Admit it: You’ve self-diagnosed on WebMD. We all have. You
find some mole that looks a little weird or a cough that sounds a little too rattly,
and you diagnose yourself with some dread disease. Cancer. Whooping cough. The
bubonic plague.
You march into the doctor’s office with your research in
hand, complete with what course of treatment she should prescribe. Before you've ever talked to the expert, you’ve figured out your problem and your
solution.
Any good doctor worth her salt is going to sit you down and
talk you out of it. Any good doctor is going to help you realize that your mole
is just that, a mole, that your cough is just an edge of a cold or whatever
diagnosis is correct or appropriate. Or they’ll find out what the real
underlying issue is. Because that’s what doctors do: they get to the real
problem under all the symptoms.
In a way, no matter what business you’re in, we’re all doctors.
It’s not our job to take our patient or client at their word when they tell us
what’s wrong; it’s up to us to look past the flashy symptoms to the root cause.
I see this a lot. Folks walk in the door
saying they want help with social media. They’ve heard they need to be on
social media, so they want to be on social media. But when you sit down and
talk to them, what they really need is more leads. What they really need is to
mine a new demographic. What they really need is to galvanize their existing
base. And depending on what that true need is, social media
may or may not be the right path to take.
When it comes time to do your own marketing, sit down and
consider what you’re really trying to achieve. Remember, the goal of
marketing is not to be good at marketing. All the awards, all the
Facebook comments, all the website hits aren’t worth a hill of beans if your
business is floundering. Before you embark on any marketing endeavor, ask
yourself what problem you’re trying to solve, what need you’re trying to fill,
what isn’t working now. Next, make sure your marketing strategy is actually
achieving those goals, not just making you feel better in the short term.
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