“Patience is a virtue that carries a lot of WAIT.” – Anon
Whether you’re marketing online or off the web, one very important virtue you must develop, if you lack it, is PATIENCE. That is, IF you are to succeed with your business marketing for the long term.
You need to be patient. VERY PATIENT. You have to think like a hunter on the trail of nervous wild deer. Successful business marketing requires the foregoing as a basic minimum. That’s what will equip you to extract useful insights from the different efforts you make to sell your products and services.
Rarely can you reasonably hope to get overnight results. You are more likely to engage in testing and re-testing, till you get something that works just right for you.
That nurturing process can be quite taxing and time consuming. If you lack patience, you are likely to cut corners and not do it right. But that will show in what you send out to the market place – and the results will be just as disappointing.
Making sure you are in a business you absolutely LOVE doing, is what determines whether you will be able to find enough PATIENCE to keep going till you get IT.
"Unless the person running your marketing is patient, it will be difficult to practice commitment. View marketing as an investment, be consistent, and make prospects confident. Patience is a guerrilla virtue." – Jay Conrad Levinson in "The 15 Secrets of Guerrilla Marketing" – http://www.gmarketingcoach.com
If It Was Easy, Everyone Would Be Succeeding At It
In order to succeed, a business must make sales. Not credit sales, but sales that result in money received and in the bank. Marketing creates selling opportunities. However, very often marketing must be repeated or continued for considerable periods before the desired sales happen.
Records show that more businesses fail every year, than those that succeed. The latter are usually those able to make enough sales happen to cover expenses and keep them going. The fact that not every business succeeds in doing that proves that it’s not easy to do.
Which is why you will need to creatively leverage unconventional strategies, tools and technology, to get high impact marketing exposure. A willingness to be patient is a crucial requirement for making that happen. Business marketing requires unrelenting persistence, and is unlikely to yield 100% profitable returns overnight. Accept that reality, and be prepared to do what is needed, or you may not make it.
Measuring Your Business Marketing Success : An Index You Can Use
On a final note, it’s useful to measure your progress. You can, for instance, correlate your marketing expenditure to your client conversion. One useful parameter to periodically measure in this regard is your COCA i.e. Cost of Customer Acquisition. With patience, you get enough information to realistically determine what marketing method(s) wins you customers most cost-effectively. You would then improve on it to boost your conversion rates. Your patience would have paid off.