What Happens When Best Practices Fail
Posted by 
on Tuesday, October 30, 2012 
at 3:59 PM 
in 
“Best practices.”
You’ve seen that term before. One of those buzzwords for business that we are all expected to abide by. Kind of like “streamlining” or “synergy.”
You’ve been reading all about how your company needs to ramp up its marketing efforts, adapt to the shifting environment caused by enhanced media and breakthroughs in technology. You have downloaded all the White Papers you could get your hands on. Listened to every podcast. Gone to conferences.
And nothing seems to be working.
It can be so easy to get discouraged if your marketing efforts are tanking. “Why isn’t traffic increasing? Am I just wasting time with online marketing?”
The answer is a resounding, “no.”
We all can’t be ambassadors for brands like Coca-Cola or Nike. Crafting an online presence for a small business takes time, effort and, occasionally, hardship. It’s a marathon.
Every small business is founded for a reason. There is the belief in a product or service, held dear by the men and women who get behind it. Successful small businesses are not founded on the drive to accrue wealth. They are founded on the principles of hard work and sacrifice to share this new idea with the world.
Harry Truman once said, “I studied the lives of great men and famous women, and I found that the men and women who got to the top were those who did the jobs they had in hand, with everything they had of energy and enthusiasm and hard work.” Your integrated marketing efforts may not be going as smoothly as you had hoped, but to give up on them is to give up on your initial devotion to your product.
Online marketing is a product of consistency and unflinching determination. Henry Ford said that “failure is the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently.” You adapt when sales are down, why not adapt when reception of your marketing is down?
Don’t become disenfranchised with marketing. Abandoning it will not benefit your company. But marketing smarter will. Learn from what doesn’t work – take notes on all of your efforts. Success will come, it may just take longer than you had hoped.
To learn about how interlinkONE can help you achieve your goals, click here.
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