What Should I Do Next?
You will almost never hear an entrepreneur confidently say “I know exactly what to do next.” At least when it comes to marketing. You may find books or blogs willing to tell you, but those are misleading, because what you should do next is unique to your business. Your unique answer is a product of two things:
1. What you want people to feel about your business.
2. What you know about marketing.
What do you want people to feel?
This is a tough one to grasp. Usually the focus is on what you want people to know about your business:
“Let’s give them more knowledge. The more they know about us, the more they will want to do business with us.”
Load them up with features and benefits and they will line up at the door. But if that were true, whoever had the most to say would win the most business. Yet we know that people make decisions emotionally, and later justify them logically. When customers make a decision to purchase from you, you want that decision to be emotional.
First, flip your paradigm to one of sparking emotions, instead of one of a creating bank of knowledge. You have now opened up an entirely new set of answers to the NEXT question.
What do you know about marketing?
Here we also need a bit of a paradigm shift, from tactics to fundamentals. It’s unproductive (and costly) to jump into tactics without first knowing the fundamentals. A sense of urgency to “do something” often leads an entrepreneur to try the latest tactic because she hears that Pinterest works, or that email marketing gets results. This chasing after tactics is precisely the reason why we have to continually ask the question: “What should I do next?” Because the previous next thing we did, didn’t work.
What is really needed is a strategy based on what you want people to feel about your business, combined with your knowledge of the fundamentals of marketing. And that brings me to my point (yes, I did have one).
An Informal (Free) Course in Marketing
The mission of TheMarketingSpot.com is to turn entrepreneurs into marketers. If you don’t want to hire me or another marketing consultant, or you just want to do it yourself, you need fundamental knowledge of marketing. So I’ve collected articles and features from my blog into an informal course in marketing.
First, start with a broad explanation the fundamentals: The Four Essential Marketing Spot Explained
Next, read these articles based on each of the Four Spots: Branding, Experience, Conversation, Promotion. There are about 10 articles per Spot: The Marketing Spot 101
Then, you can dive in and shore up your knowledge with these webinars: Free Marketing Webinars
If you can make it all the way through, you will have enough knowledge to confidently market your business. You will be a marketer who has no problem answering the question: What should I do next?
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