Marketing - The Patience Game

Marketing is all about getting attention. Attention for your brand, for your product and hopefully eventually converting those to sales. Marketing is also, however, about patience. 

We are in our first year, really we'll call it our first quarter, of actual existence. And by existence, we mean we have a viable, optimized-for-selling website. 

Naturally the optimistic side of you believes that since you have a good product, stand for a great cause that will resonate with people, you're going to open up your sale funnel and people will come flying in to purchase your goods. 

It doesn't really work that way. The reality is we don't even actually know exactly who our customers are going to be. We have an idea, but at best it is a guess. 

Having worked in retail for the past 12 years, there have been many surprises along the way about who actually buys your product. I, (the male author of this post), have seen entire marketing campaigns set-up to deliver messages about a certain product to an 18-30 year-old male demographic, only to have the actual end consumers be 60+ year-old females. 

You just don't really know who you are going to resonate with. The great thing today about this issue is that we have access to more data about consumer interests and behaviour than ever before in the history of humankind. 

The problem is you need to somehow harness that data. Enter, our marketing agency. They're working on taking the guess-work out, and applying actual data to the decision-making process. 

But it's not exactly a quick timeline. We've been running Facebook and Instagram exploratory ads now for a while. Probably coming up on six weeks. The data is slowly starting to take shape. 

But in order to do so, they have had to set-up a massive dragnet of different buckets of criteria. And the only way to get meaningful insights, is to wait. And watch. And wait some more. 

Waiting isn't easy. You want to go out there and capture customers left, right and centre. But being a start-up, it's pretty important to us that we maximize our spending as best we can. 

There is no point in spending $1,000 on an ad campaign only to see that despite great creative and a great message, you've totally missed the mark on your audience. But I'll tell you, it isn't easy. 

Especially in these early days as you wait for sales to ramp up. You have bills, companies to pay. And you want to jump ahead and get to the conversion part of the marketing where you start closing off sales and shipping product. 

But we have some good advice from people who understand what we want, but also understand how to tell us that good things come to those who wait. And there are days where it's not the message we want and I close the laptop case and walk away so as to not write an impatience-fueled response.

So our advice to you as you start out, for whatever our advice is worth, is to remember that this is a long-term game. 99.9% of businesses do not hit a home run out of the gate and get bought for a 9-figure sum. You've got to love the journey and the grind. You've got to believe that what you're doing is making a difference and giving you something more than just a monetary reward. 

And you've got to have patience. Lots of it...

Much love and thank you for reading! We love hearing from you so don't be shy to send us some comments or a message!

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