You Have Got to be Crazy.

How Small Businesses Successfully Adopt

Inbound Marketing Strategies

The Concept of Inbound Marketing

Causes Schizophrenia

If you are struggling with adopting and changing to Inbound Marketing Strategies it is because you are schizophrenic. While your rational side wants: a lower cost per lead, a heightened sense of community, an ability to inspire, and offers of valued products and services to loyal followers, your emotional side thinks differently. It’s the elephant in the room looking for the quick payoff – “Buy the TV ad… it’s easy. We’ll talk about features and how great we are. We’ve done it before.”

The Problem is the TV ad doesn’t work as well as it used to – Nor does traditional outbound messaging on features – You do what millions of us do each morning… you hit the snooze alarm even though the rational side of your brain knows the right thing to do is to get up at 6:00 AM. Then we panic to get out the door in time.

Rorschach

inkblot

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Your Will Power has been Sapped

Self control and will power are not inexhaustible. Ever been on a diet?

And [a diet] is usually the approach taken by small business leaders when they attempt to adopt Inbound Marketing Strategies. They decide to alter their consumption patterns but keep the temptation of the quick emotional payoff of TV and Radio and Print (whatever their “normal” is) within arm’s reach. Let’s say they take a different approach – Inbound Marketing as a diet pill. We look at diet pills as a panacea. Of course the rational side of our brain would say “read the instructions,” which of course the elephant in the room (our emotional side) replies, “if the pill is any good then just taking it should be enough.” We don’t combine the pill with diet and exercise. We hit the snooze alarm again. We consume a piece of Inbound Marketing - we try a thing or two (start a Twitter account – read SEO for Dummies) and then it is right back to the buffet of Radio, TV, and print or whatever your “normal” is. Plus, the local Yellow Pages has a special going on!!! Never mind you haven’t picked up a Yellow Pages in years other than to recycle it. Search engines are just too easy to access nowadays – even from a phone, how ironic is that?

You are Unsupervised

As they say, “It is lonely at the top.” You are unsupervised. Now you may have a board or a group of advisors but their job is not to supervise you, in fact they might be the ones advising you to try a diet of Inbound Marketing (maybe they think you won’t hit the snooze alarm). Inevitably you do. Disappointment is shared all the way around. How now will you get the cost per lead to drop? This change you are trying to create is hard because you are wearing yourself out. Your advisors may think you are lazy (maybe even incompetent) while in fact you are exhausted since you are exercising tremendous effort to turn things around – after all you are not crazy, right? You are working feverishly to get the things that worked in the past to cost less or function more efficiently. What if I change the timeslots around? What if I change radio stations? What if I can negotiate a better rate? Maybe I could improve the TV commercial? What if I used someone with an Australian accent for the voice over work? What if? What if? And if you become truly exhausted, then in some months it all begins to blur – it is the same thing that happens when you drive down a long open stretch of highway… you can’t remember the last few miles you traveled. It’s far easier to say you are trying, offer some evidence and hope everyone is placated. Placating is the same thing as a snooze alarm – it buys you some time, but you just end up more panicked and just as exhausted.

Change is hard because people wear themselves out trying to swim to the other side.

The Problem: You don’t Think

you are “Crazy!”

We view the world through our own rose colored lenses – we think everyone sees what we see. What we don’t realize is how fast the world around us is changing. We change through adoption and the rate at which we adopt is variable. You may be a “late majority” adopter (you have about a thirty percent chance). Worse you may be a “resister” (17% chance). If you are a resister type then go ahead and jump off the bridge because the rest of us are crazy… just not you… and you won’t be able to stand being around these crazy people always tethered to their cell phones, using Skype, or Twitter, or Quora. And why don’t people ever send hand written notes via the postal service anymore? The rest of us will reach an epiphany – we will realize that we are CRAZY for not adopting Inbound Marketing strategies, because we’ll see our competitors growing their businesses, being talked about, receiving positive press, and increasing their traffic rates all done with Inbound Marketing strategies. You will realize that you could be doing the same things and If you don’t you would think yourself CRAZY! Everyone before you has reached this point – If you were Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan at Hubspot you would have realized you were crazy early on and adopted Inbound Marketing before anyone else – that is because Halligan and Shah are “innovator” types (8% of us). We would have thought them crazy were it not for “leaders” (17% of us) like David Meerman Scott (innovative in his own right) who evangelized and provided trusted advice and opinions which led to the “early majority” adopters (29% of us) adopting Inbound Marketing strategies. This is about where we are today. The early majority is still in its adoption phase – leaving a lot more that half of us to yet realize we are CRAZY for not adopting Inbound Marketing strategies… and a lot of exhausted small business owners with blurred memories of long open highway stretches.

Inbound Marketing:

Not an Analytical Choice

The emotional side of your brain trumps reason every single time. If you think you are going to overcome emotion and adopt Inbound Marketing based on marketing facts, figures, and presentations from the internet - you are just dead wrong (this presentation included). Instead you will have lots of meetings about Inbound Marketing. You will talk about Inbound Marketing ROI and whether the diet pills are working. Mostly the meetings will end with scheduling the next meeting. The meetings will take place further and further apart since you can never come to a clear conclusion, and you would rather see the issue just go away. People go on diets because they see a skinny person. People move to Inbound Marketing strategies because they realize they are CRAZY not too. Thinking you’re crazy is a lot different than wishing you were skinny because it is not crazy to want to be skinny. It is crazy not to adopt Inbound Marketing strategies when a competitor is successfully doing it – unless you are in the habit of giving your business or advantages away. Being crazy is a great motivator. Say it with me, “This is crazy… I am crazy. And I have got to make sure this changes.” That is good. You just became the elephant. You can now emotionally champion the Inbound Marketing strategies you will seek out and adopt, thus avoiding the schizophrenia. You are going to feel that this is the right thing to do – you will have pushed this from your Frontal Lobes down into your Limbic “Old” Brain – you will now operate at the gut level of feeling, the most powerful of all feelings right next to love. You will incorporate these feelings into your purpose, cause and beliefs about your business. You will invite people to listen to how you accomplish your beliefs, and you will share with them the results of your efforts.

Good Luck! Hope to see you at the funny farm.

Would You Like More

Crazy Thoughts and Opinions?

Michael Years

Market Development Consulting

LēD GĕN 3.0

561-819-8179

http://ledgen30.com

mikeyears@ledgen30.com

Twitter: @mikeyears