Failure is your best marketing teacher
Failure is your best marketing teacher
How your losses can ultimately lead to your most brilliant breakthroughs
If you’ve had to shift perspectives and strategies again and again to make things work the past few years, it turns out you were doing exactly what you should be doing—building “grit.”
So today, you’ll either feel validated or inspired. Hopefully a little of both.
Today’s agenda:
🥾 How to add “grit” to your marketing strategy
🏅 Shared goals = shared success
✍️ Simple tips for better content
💼 Briefly — our quick news roundup
⏱️ Up & coming
🧳 It’s about the journey, not the destination
Have you become afraid to fail?
Unfortunately or fortunately—depending on how you define growth—failure is an inevitable part of leadership.
😥 Marketing expert Cathy Colliver says failure can result in the following:
Keep us from trying over and over
Give us a wakeup call that we need to try something else
There’s not much that’s in our control beyond our reaction to failure.
When it comes to marketing, the process is a continual search for mastery—which is going to result in both incredible breakthroughs and failures.
🏈 The recipe for ‘gritty marketing’
Grit = endurance.
Colliver says a gritty marketer:
Is curious and playful
Learns from good and bad experiences
Lets go of what they cannot control
Understands that knowing when something does not work is as important as making something work
💡 Would you consider yourself a “gritty marketer”? Or for that matter, a gritty entrepreneur?
🧗 What does ‘success’ mean to you?
Success is the ultimate goal, right?
If that’s the case, why do so many teams not agree on what “success” is?
🥂 Consultants and authors Bob Frisch and Cary Greene call it the “champagne question”: If you were toasting to your success on New Year’s Eve, what would you be celebrating? How is that success measured?
📑 Getting everyone on the same page
Of course, Frisch and Greene found that most teams weren’t aligned on the answer to the champagne question.
Here’s how you can reach this alignment:
Ask the champagne question to each team member individually and analyze the answers
Review the responses as a group and ensure everyone is up-to-date on the latest company data
Divide the group into smaller groups and have them come to an agreement on a new answer to the champagne question
Review the revised responses and help the team further narrow down the options via real-time polling
Determine next steps and arrange further discussion
💡 The authors acknowledge the process may need further investigation, but allows for a “continuous dialogue” to unite your team.
🎢 Building a better experience
Better content experiences can feel difficult to achieve, especially for solopreneurs or sales teams of one.
Lisa Dougherty of Content Market Institute says marketers can try these simple ideas to improve content:
Use inclusive language that brings your reader into the conversation (i.e. using more “you” instead of “I”
Ask questions to encourage participation
Offer audio and alt text to articles for added accessibility
Include more links as additional educational resources
💡 Which ideas can you start implementing this week?
Briefly
✍️ A new survey found that humans actually prefer AI-generated content vs. human because it is more concise and easier to read
💵 The Federal Reserve squashed some dreams when it announced March rate cuts aren’t likely—but they may just need a few more months
🤖 MIT economics professor Daron Acemoglu says 2024 will be about “recalibrating expectations” surrounding AI—in other words, its growth is probably going to be a lot more disappointing than many expected
📹 Tips for an “easy and intuitive way” to edit videos and make them ready for social media
📺 YouTube reaches 1 million subscribers for its Premium service, which removes ads from videos and enables background download and play and higher-quality streaming for $13.99 per month
Up & Coming
Google Search Generative Experience (SGE) was supposed to roll out of Google Labs at the end of last year, but it has remained quietly in testing for the foreseeable future.