It can be hard to know whether you’re making the ‘right’ business decision. Most decisions will involve risk, and it’s up to us to figure out whether the risk outweighs the result. However, the biggest risk you could be taking is being indecision, which then leads to status quo. When faced with challenging business decisions, your business habits and mindset will affect your outcome. This means that the result you want heavily relies on the resources at your disposal, including which ones you choose, and how you choose to use them.
Here are some business mindsets we’ve noticed in our clients and how it can affect your business both positively and/or negatively.
Start-Stop
In this approach, you’ve made a decision to go ahead with something, but at some point decide to stop completely and wait a while before starting again. This mindset is still decisive; however the decision may not be backed up by a logical reason – it’s most probably because of habit. Let’s use a real example of a company’s use of digital marketing tools. They started up a Facebook account and had gained quite a number of loyal follows on their page. One day, out of the blue, the company decided to stop their social media campaign and stop posting on Facebook. Their reasoning was: “With all our marketing campaigns, be it radio or TV ads, we run it for 6 months and then we give it a break.” While this decision may make sense to them, this mindset is more detrimental than beneficial. This is because while they wait without continuing to post anything, all their loyal followers will either start to forget them or think the company no longer does business. The worst outcome, however, is that during those couple of years they have wasted time – time to get more clients, time to get their name out there, and time to develop their company and network further. If you really believe one medium isn’t working quite right for you, then try changing instead of constantly stopping.
The Wait
This mindset could be seen as the least effective, but the most common. If you have the waiting approach, you have most things ready to go but all that’s missing is you actually taking the final step and publishing. So ask yourself… are you procrastinating? What are you really waiting for? Waiting until you have a clear idea of what you want to create and achieve is great. While it helps to have everything all together and ready to go for when you finally decide to publish your site and delve further into marketing, by doing this you risk ending up finding more things you should do and ‘the wait’ becomes even longer. One month turns into two, two turn into 12, and so on. No one is perfect, and in the constantly changing world that is the internet, there are so many factors you must now get to know about digital marketing. From SEO and Adwords and social media to content management, it’s a lot to be expected to learn before launching. There’s no better time like the present to jump on the bandwagon and get your brand out there. So rather than waiting and dealing with the inevitable fact later that marketing strategies have developed further and left you behind, start now and let your brand and give yourself the chance to explore and grow with these changes in marketing.
The fixer-upper
People with this mindset understand that in the digital marketing world, regardless of the type of company, things are constantly changing. Regardless, they throw themselves into it without having a plan and without having researched much about the marketing world. Their thinking caps are firmly strapped on, and are prepared to fix things up along the way. It may sounds messy and frighten you to take that plunge while feeling a bit blind, but think about it this way. People with this mind set are determined, goal driven and passionate. These traits are enough to allow them to adapt to changing marketing strategies, but also to give them the endurance to give it a real go before abandoning the strategy. They won’t be put off by some initial losses, because they know that once the marketing strategies start to work, it will result in profit. It takes time, but you must be in the playing field. And during this time, they will have found the best marketing strategy for their type of company.
It’s been stated various times that the Apollo rockets were off course 97% of the time. Despite this, they still reached their destinations not only with perfect precision, but also in perfect time. What does this tell us? In your business venture, there will always be factors that could take you off course. Whether it’s new technologies or changing strategies, you can still make it to your end goal, as long as you are willing to adapt to these changes and new developments in order to steer back on course. Don’t just wait, because you could miss so many opportunities.
Our advice to you would be to recognise your business habits and look at whether they’re helping or hindering you. Rather than stopping, try changing your mindset just a little. Think about the short term as well as the long term. Know when it’s worth taking a risk with a particular marketing strategy, or get advice from someone and listen.
What other mindsets have you noticed from people in your area of business? Share them with us in the comment box below.
