Why Try To Get Out Of Your Box, When You Can Use What's In It?
In an effort to polish and perfect; in handing over your work for six other people to edit; in redoing the work again and again until it’s flawless, you remove the thing that people actually look for and connect with in the work: humanity, vulnerability…. you.
Stay Positive & Don’t Lose The Best Part
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When someone says “it’s good enough” …. and maybe it’s you saying it; it’s worth pausing to define who it’s good enough for.
Perhaps it’s good enough for you given the time restraint you had to get it done.
Perhaps it’s good enough to share in a board meeting.
Perhaps it’s good enough to at least send out.
But what about the person that’s most likely to tell others about it. Is it good enough for them?
They’re the real target, after all, right?
Stay Positive & Good, Now Enough (But For Who?)
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To create something meaningful you need a blend of two attributes.
The first is new and shiny.
The second is what works.
At first glance, these two seem to combat each other, but consider looking at “newness” as the “what” and the “what works” as the “how.”
An elastic belt, made out of wood with a plastic bottle opener on the backside of the buckle is new.
Having it handcrafted by someone who gives a damn? That’s what works.
Turns out attributes like generosity, care, empathy – and so on – all work together to help showcase and sell something that’s new, might not work, and is unfamiliar.
Stay Positive & Even The Leap Into New (Something New) Is Inspiring (Something That Works)
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There’s a few ways that impatience is actually a virtue.
Take, for example, being impatient with your generosity.
Being impatient about finding the actual root cause of a problem.
Being impatient about an organized and clean space, too.
Stay Positive & Impatience Can Be A Virtue If You Work It Right
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More often than not, when someone says “I didn’t sign up for this” they really did.
They signed up for the potential risks, the ones they knew about and the ones they didn’t.
They signed up for the naysayers and pushback and status-quo-upholders.
They signed up to be trusted by others with work on their job descriptions.
Here’s the cold hard truth: we either choose to be accountable or we choose to hide.
When we choose to be accountable, it doesn’t matter what unforeseen event takes place, what the contract lists as your responsibilities or what others ask of you; the accountable person says one of two things.
I signed up for this when I took responsibility.
Or.
I didn’t sign up for this…. but I’m taking responsibility now.
Stay Positive & Lean In, You’ll Be Better Because Of It
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When it comes to the best email marketing campaign teams, you can bet they have a small list of customers they send a test email to. Perhaps they ask for direct feedback or perhaps they track specific metrics that they use to make final updates prior to sending out the email to the full list.
As for the best content marketing teams? Yea, you guessed it. The best put the content in front of a few of their prospective targets – even before they share it with more potential customers or even, say, the leadership team.
The same can be said for the best of any marketing team.
Getting feedback from actual customers not only gives you better insights and opportunities for improvements prior to distributing the work to a larger group, it gives you a tool to use to combat less-than-stellar recommendations from internal or non-customer, external folks.
We all know it’s hard to say no to a boss or CEO, so we don’t. But when you can pivot and say “We actually ran this by X customer and they said they liked it this way” …. Magic happens.
Stay Positive & Make More Magic Happen (Create A Pilot Group Of Reviewers)
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Marketers are damn good at knowing what story they want people to tell themselves after they use their product or service.
Take a gander at any 10 commercials and 9 of them will descriptively state the benefits and what life could be like for the viewer.
The damn good marketers, however, are great at knowing what the story is the potential customers are telling themselves before they pay for their product or service.
People want to be seen. They don’t just want to be told where point B is, they want to be told “It looks like you’re at point A, this is how you get to point B if you want.”
Stay Positive & Start With The Story Before, Not After
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