Think about the circus.
If you worked there every day, how many times would you see the elephants?
Every morning they’re there.
Every afternoon they’re there.
Every night you’re watching the same elephants walk into the same ring and do the same thing.
Eventually you might think:
Does anybody really care about these elephants anymore?
Meanwhile…
some eight-year-old kid is sitting in the audience seeing an elephant in real life for the first time.
His mind is blown.
That’s something worth remembering in marketing.
You experience your marketing completely differently than your prospects do.
You’ve read your ad 100 times.
They may be seeing it for the first time.
You’ve told your best story so many times you can barely stand telling it again.
They’ve never heard it.
You’ve given the presentation 50 times.
This is their first time in the room.
You’ve been making the same offer for three years and you’re itching to do something new.
They just discovered you last week.
That’s why one of the easiest mistakes to make is changing something that’s working simply because you’re tired of it.
You confuse your exposure with their exposure.
They’re not the same thing.
I learned this years ago with advertising.
If an ad keeps generating leads, I don’t care how tired I am of looking at it.
Keep running it.
If a story reliably helps people understand an important idea, keep telling it.
If an offer reliably gets the right people to raise their hands, keep making it.
Don’t make your customers pay the price for your boredom.
Don’t make your customers pay the price for your boredom.
There’s certainly a place for innovation.
Yesterday we talked about putting something ALL NEW! NEVER SEEN BEFORE! on the poster.
But that doesn’t mean you remove everything that already works.
Sometimes the smartest marketing decision you can make is to leave the elephant alone.
So before you change something today because it feels stale, ask yourself:
Is the market bored with this…or am I?
Those are two very different problems.
Dean