why step out of your comfort zone?
Stepping out of our own comfort zone can be hard to do. It takes confidence. Particularly when we want to achieve something new and we’ve not done it before. We often have the conversation in our head:
“It’s character building!”
- “Yeah, but how do I know I’ll be successful in my endeavours?”
“You won’t know until you try.”
- “Urgh. Okay, here goes.”
The fear factor
When we finally overcome the fear factor and “step out” it often leads to progression, heightened self-confidence and growth.
So, personal comfort zones aside, can the same be said for marketing? As a function?
Tactical marketing
With tactical marketing you don't know if something new - outside of "what you've always done" - will work until you try. This is where the more you test new ways of doing things, the more you learn.
The good thing with marketing is that you should be testing and measuring as much of your efforts as possible - to see what’s working, what’s not working and what needs tweaking and testing again!
Usually it’s easier to do things “the way we’ve always done them” as it gives marketers some control to their marketing plans, tactical campaigns etc. But marketers won’t learn anything from this and the brand won’t benefit either, especially if it’s a small business. Small businesses need to be agile and open to trying new approaches to marketing, sales etc.
two Examples
You may want to see if creating branded animated gifs on Twitter would drive better engagement with your followers. Measuring the engagement of your tweets and comparing them to other content shared on Twitter gives you insight as to whether this media is right for your brand and audience.
What if adopting a different style of writing would help you connect with a target audience and increase leads? And yet you can measure the page views, time spent on page, landing pages and exit pages, behaviour flow etc via Google Analytics and any leads/enquiries you generate from the content you’ve written differently.
Marketing metrics gives you a safety net to try new things, test, tweak and test again - fundamental for all tactical marketing.
Step out
Give it a go.
Step out of your marketing comfort zone and see what progress takes place. It may surprise you and lead to growth of the business kind.
“All progress takes place outside the comfort zone.”
Michael John Bobak.