Don’t abandon your marketing strategy too soon

Click to see the video on how to fail at marketing better!

How to learn from failure over time and increase profit

Has your marketing strategy ever fallen as flat as a pancake? Mine sure has!

I’ve been making weekly videos for over 10 years now. Some of them get 150 views, some of them get 150,000 views. You know what’s weird? At the time, it seems like the campaign fell flat. Few views, nobody signing up for the workshop or for lessons with me.

The campaign didn’t fail because I’m a crappy teacher, or because I suck at marketing (although I sometimes do!). It failed because failure is a necessary part of building a business.

For failure to fuel impact and profit, it’s necessary to take a longer view and stick to your marketing strategy until you learn something useful.

Sticking to your strategy through the feeling and short-term experience of failure is necessary to assess the causes and tweak the strategy. Don’t abandon it before you get the golden nugget of learning!

In my case, the video with 100 views was speaking to a very particular issue: your hyoid bone. Yup. That’s pretty geeky and specific! There was no traction at first, but in a year’s time it brought me 3 private clients who would otherwise never found me. Now it’s had 1500 views.

The video with 157,000 views, on the other hand, has great SEO but until today (I tweaked it!) It had no call to action, and it didn’t make me any sales when I originally posted it.

That video is obviously providing value to viewers, and it continues to increase my SEO engagement and build my “brand” (what a ridiculous term for my video channel, but whatever!) even if it originally fell flat in terms of sales. In the end, I’m still a success.

I keep posting videos regularly no matter what. Also, I continue to grow and learn as I process the “feedback” that the internet gives me. Google analytics is not evil as far as I’m concerned. Tubebuddy (yes – that’s an affiliate link) is a fantastic SEO tool if your main marketing channel is YouTube.

Make sure that you have one or two reliable methods of gathering engagement feedback for every marketing effort you make.

Sales is the finish line, and it’s certainly the ultimate form of feedback. However, you need other forms of feedback to tell you what’s getting engagement before the potential customer gets to that finish line.

My marketing strategy is to provide tons of value with no pressure to buy, but hey, don’t forget to include a call to action every so often! By the way, I recommend not having one every posting, but choose a rhythm. 1 call to action for every 5 postings. Or, go back and put CTA’s on old stuff that is still getting engagement!

It took time to learn this basic lesson, but I’m a shameless learner. That’s one of the perks of studying the Alexander Technique! I’m happy because I’ve built a wonderful profitable business doing what I love.

I know many supremely skilled embodiment professionals that avoid marketing because when they are marketed to by others, it feels annoying, manipulative, and even slimy.

You can feel it in body even before your brain realizes these tactics are in play:

  1. Exaggerated claims: Become a millionaire in 6 months!
  2. Psychological manipulation: If you don’t buy this, you will be left behind in the dust of capitalism or social isolation!
  3. Hidden costs: Read these three very compelling sales pages to find out what I’m offering, when it is, and how much it really costs!
Instead, for embodiment professionals I recommend an authentic, value driven strategy.

Just make sure you build in multiple methods of measuring engagement, and feed that information into your content creation and marketing process.

No embodiment professional wants to cause the kind of jacked up, fearful, and desperate state of being that manipulative marketing relies on. Creating a state of fear that can only be assuaged by clicking the buy button sucks. That’s what we are trying to steer people away from.

Carry on! And if you need some business support, drop me a line with your questions or book a session. I’d love to help you accelerate your learning process.

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