“You can’t fully love someone if you’re afraid to get hurt.”
Ever heard that phrase before?
I can’t recall where I got it from… Probably some TV show!
I know it sounds cheesy, but there’s a kernel of truth to it.
When you’re afraid to get hurt, you put up walls and barriers to protect yourself. That means you can’t truly get close to your partner, because you don’t go ‘all in’. You’re holding yourself back.
You are actually setting yourself up for failure.
Only by destroying those walls, can you truly be open about who you really are – and experience love in its entirety.
Mushy, I know……. But highly relevant to your online marketing.
You see, here too, if you’re afraid to lose and hold yourself back, you will never succeed.
Here are two examples I see the whole time.
First, companies that will only spend a small amount on online advertising until they see it works, because they’re afraid of ‘pouring too much money down the drain’.
It sounds sensible – but in fact, it ensures that you fail.
The fact is that advertising online takes money to get right.
Most companies don’t hit on a winning advertising formula from day one. In fact, most of your early adverts won’t be that great.
The secret, in the early phases, is to test, test, test, so you can improve what you’re doing. You have to be willing to pay for a lot of experiments, so that you can find what works best.
Once you have an ad that converts well and is profitable, the natural thing to do is to scale up. But if you’re too scared to approve that initial spend, you’ll never find your high-converting ad.
Here’s another way companies sabotage their marketing by holding back.
They don’t email their leads frequently enough. Sometimes they are afraid of annoying their email list, other times they don’t want to spend time and money on developing more copy because they’re not sure they’ll see a return. So they email their potential customers only once a month, dipping their toe in the water….
And then say “it’s not working”‘.
It’s no wonder…
How many companies that email you once a month do you actually pay attention to?
Miss one of their emails, and you can go a couple of months without thinking of them at all…
It’s a miracle if your leads even remember who you are.
It’s also difficult to run any kind of sustained campaign or build an argument over several emails, when they’re only hearing from you every few weeks. Even your keenest readers are (sadly) unlikely to remember what you said to them two weeks ago.
The upshot: You need to be a little courageous in your marketing. Commit to it wholeheartedly, to give it a chance.
Because, to paraphrase that TV show, you can’t fully succeed in marketing if you’re afraid to get hurt.
