Marketing Refresh: How to Plan for Greater Results

Episode 39 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how to overcome obstacles and plan for new and greater results with a marketing refresh.  One of the challenges with marketing is the uncertainty about whether or not your actions will produce results. That doubt kills your ability to come up with new ideas. And it crushes your will to enthusiastically do the work that needs to be done to move your business forward. Fortunately, there is a solution. It's one that I experienced firsthand when I created the plan for Landscape Digital Institute. You simply have to rewrite reality. Your current reality is where you are at right now. This is your baseline. So, the first thing you need to do is write out the current marketing reality for your business. Be honest about what's working and what isn't. This works best if you literally write with a pen to get physically and emotionally engaged with it. Then set that aside and hand write your new reality, what you envision for the future. Here's why this exercise is so valuable. You are not trying to live in a fantasy world. You are visualizing the reality you want for your business. And guess what? Your mind cannot distinguish between fantasy and reality. It's a scientific fact. You prove this to yourself every time you go to the movies and suspend your disbelief by letting that reality wash over you. You allow your mind to be terrified, fall in love, or free fall off a cliff. You create your own reality every day, and the reason it doesn t always work out is your tendency to repeat the past. So, to create a better reality you have to first visualize it. Here are three actions you'll need to take to put that into practice. 1. Ideas Ideas are the air that marketing needs to breathe. Maybe you are familiar with this quote from the Nobel Prize-winning scientist. "The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas." ~Linus Pauling There are many paths for manifesting your new reality. The way to find the best marketing strategy is to generate a lot of ideas because most likely the best one will be found at the intersection of two or three of them. Incidentally, this also holds true for creating content. You have to generate a lot of ideas by reading, doing research, and interacting with other landscaping and lawn care professionals. 2. Activities Let's unpack your current reality by doing an activity audit. This will include activities such as generating ideas, writing and editing content, creating images to enhance it, publishing that content, adding links and keywords, and so on. If you seriously want to grow, a key activity will be doing research and study to acquire new skills. Now ask yourself which of those activities you enjoy doing and which should be delegated or hired out. For this to be a true marketing refresh you will most likely have to stop doing certain activities to add others and do them well. Just remember this. There will always be a certain amount of struggle. That struggle is telling you that those activities are important to you. If they weren't you would have given up long ago. And that takes us to our final action. 3. Commitment You cannot accomplish anything without effort. Commitment is a tough thing to do when you are not getting results. That's the whole purpose of rewriting your reality. When your mind can visualize a new reality clearly, your body is more likely to follow. Most of us are not unwilling to work. We just give up because we cannot see the finish line well enough to then plan how to get there. Show Notes This article will help you organize the implementation of your marketing refresh activities: Marketing Systems: 3 Steps to Production Efficiency. Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes. And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that! Call to Action The call to action for this episode is to implement these steps, with the most important one being passionately writing your new marketing reality. You will be amazed at how it works. Reread that reality daily as you are creating your 2017 marketing plan. If you have questions on this, hit reply to any of my emails or use the contact form at Landscape Digital Institute and I will do my best to help you out. Thanks for listening. The post Marketing Refresh: How to Plan for Greater Results appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.