Why a Business or Plan is Never Perfect (Ep 40)

Welcome to the Digital Marketing Made Easy Podcast. Dawn McGruer brings you actionable digital marketing lessons every other week. Whether you are an aspiring or experienced marketer, learn the latest SEO, content marketing, social media, email marketing, and online marketing tactics that are working today.

Setting yourself up for disappointment

Dawn:

Welcome to Episode 40 of Digital Marketing Made Easy with myself, Dawn McGruer, speaker, founder, and author, and of course, trainer of all things digital, including RCIM accredited qualification, which is the CIM diploma in professional digital marketing, as well as an array of courses that we offer here at the academy. Now, we have been going since 2005, and I actually started my first business back in 2000, so as an academy, we have been an evolving business since we started. And the crazy thing is, is that when we actually started the business, it wasn’t our intention to start an academy because we had an agency at the time. Now what was happening is we were creating business plans, social media, digital, all of these amazing online marketing campaigns for our clients, but the big gap that we felt was that they had no resource, or they didn’t have enough skill and talent within the business, or the right suppliers, to actually be able to implement, and manage, and run, and complete these campaigns. So, even if they were trying their best to implement the plans, the results they were getting were not as good.

So, how do you really maximize your digital marketing efforts to scale and grow your business? Well, you have to understand, first of all, the biggest thing is time, tactics, and training. Now, I speak about this a lot in my book, and in today’s episode, we’re going to be looking at the fact that not any business, none in the world, is perfect. No business has the absolute blueprint from day one. It changes, and it’s unrealistic for us to expect a business to be perfect because we’re just setting ourselves up for disappointment by expecting businesses to flawlessly deliver every single time, to meet our expectations, and for every plan and project to land instantly. It just doesn’t work that way. So, as customers, we are expecting perfection when perfection is unattainable.

So, sometimes, we have to think, it’s that fair? So, today’s podcast is all about understanding, number one, that when you go into business or you start a role or a campaign, there is no such thing as a perfect business plan. Now, in Episode 40, we are going to be covering everything to do with this because one of my pet hates is that when people start off is that they get so excited that they start to overwhelm themselves. And they start to think, “I’ve got to delay. I’ve got to delay. I have to keep this project moving so that I can get everything absolutely perfect before I launch.”

Embrace imperfect action

Now, I’d encourage you to actually embrace imperfect action. And what that means is that when you start developing a plan and growing a business, or you are even in a new role looking to accelerate your own career, there is a mission and a vision and an idea in your head, but what that translates to doesn’t always meet that expectation, and this is where we feel that we have failed.

Now, when you put a plan together, you have to understand that it’s a moving feast, it’s something that is dynamic. And I talk about this a lot in my book, and the whole reason I named it Dynamic Digital Marketing is I honestly feel that every single plan, be it online marketing, or a business plan, or any project, anything in your own personal life, is that there is no perfect plan. It has to have a foundation. It has to have the pillars of success. Now I feel like marketing is a big one of that, motivation, mindset, having ourselves all set up for the best performance. But, if I’m looking to help a business master the world of online marketing and social media to grow their business, and I’m writing a plan, I will understand their immediate goals and objectives, their medium term and their long term, and I will start to create something that aligns to that vision.

Taking a dynamic approach to your business

Now, each and every day, and as much as every 24 hour interval, things will change, and this is good because this is keeping dynamic. It means that we are adapting not only to our environment, but we’re adapting to what we learn, as well as consumer behavior. So you have to understand that when you build the foundations in place, this is when you get the core plan going. You have to start somewhere, you have to get something moving and get in traction so that you can start to learn. Now what will actually happen is you’ll probably have challenges along the way. You’ll hit some pitfalls. There’ll be some things that don’t go according to plan, but the more you hit them, the quicker the learning curve, the quicker you are taking those learnings on board, and as long as you are taking that data, that information, and you are doing something tangible with it, you’re taking action.

So let’s say you started off, you launched, you didn’t get as much leads or customer conversion as you wanted. Well, that doesn’t matter. You have to look at what you did and how you can improve it. And the thing is, if you leave that a month, you’re not being very dynamic. And this is where businesses fail because they say, “We’re not getting enough leads in, we’ve been running this campaign for a month.” You can’t do that. You have to be thinking about monitoring things in a dynamic way, with a dynamic approach, that you are completely flexible, that this plan is just the core foundation, and then every idea, every learning that comes into play is like a brick that goes on top of it.

And sometimes you’ll have to knock down that building and restart it, sometimes you’ll start building and you’ll build more annexes on the side. Sometimes you’ll have to take some of those bricks, those ideas, and put them to the side because you’re not quite sure where they’re going to go. So you have to think about it, that sometimes you will get quick progress, sometimes it will feel like you have to knock the whole thing down and start again. But that’s what business is like. No business, or plan, is perfect. And when you start a business, you have to understand that there are different elements, things that you can control and things that you can’t. And my energy is always focused towards the things that I can control, because that’s going to give you some form of certainty. It’s going to give you some form of moving forward. If you just stay stuck, nothing will change.

Tactics and training

So, if there are things that are happening in your business that are not positive, or you are feeling slightly adverse towards things, or things that are not moving in the way you want it, have a look at the bricks, look at the foundations, and maybe you need to pull down a few bricks and restart again. And this is true when you think about the talent, the team, the people within the business. And this is why I think time, tactics, and training, and I’ve dedicated a whole chapter to this in my book, is so vital. Because when we look at time, this is about time management, running projects effectively, using the right software so everything is managed, making it so that everybody energetically feels aligned to what you are doing and that people have enough time to do it.

So even when I think about talent and getting people to do a job, you can’t lay too much on that person. People’s minds don’t focus well like that. And I talk about when we recruit that I only ever give them six items in the job description, six things that they can fully manage, embrace and control, and could recite back to me. I’d know inside out, they’d know inside out, and it means that it’s simple, okay? So keep everything short and simple.

Think about when you are looking at your time, how is your time managed? Can you delegate? Can you declutter? There are lots of time tactics in the book, and I talk about this in lots of my podcasts, but, the time side of things is blocking time out, and I use time blocking. So I do quick intervals of spurts of work, I work at 90 minute intervals, take a break, next 90 minutes, then I have lunch, 90 minutes, break, and then I have the last 90 minutes, and that’s it, that’s my working day. I have days that I don’t have calls on. I have specific days, so that energetically I feel positive about my diary. I look at it, doesn’t feel overcrowded, I have space, and that allows me to have creativity, but also objectivity in the business.

Now, when we look at tactics, again, another reason I wrote Dynamic Digital Marketing was because people didn’t know how to deliver things. They would know the overarching strategy, most businesses or people working in marketing knew what they wanted to do, they just didn’t know exactly, step-by-step and in what order, they had to do. So, I started putting checklists together, and this became something that I did for clients, and then I’ve utilized in my training, and this is where my whole framework came from, the Dynamic Digital Marketing Model, eight powerful ways to market your business online.

Now, those eight powerful ways break down the exact steps, in the right order, in the right priority, so that when someone comes to do the social media, they have a step-by-step process. They have the activities, they have the tools to learn, and they know exactly what they need to do in business. Now, I’ve also included checklists in my book, and the reason for that is that when you are going through and learning something, and you are doing it, you need to check it off. It gives a sense of satisfaction, but also control within the business, it’s a manageable process. It’s something that you can put a timeline, a project plan against.

Now, time is big, tactics are big, and training is big. Now training and tactics encompasses all sorts of different tools that you can use along the way. But training is a biggie, and for most of my students, we’ve trained, what, 30,000 students now since we started, and certified all of these students in the best practices of online marketing. But ultimately what we’re doing is we’re teaching clients how to scale and grow business through online marketing.

Now, whether that’s through the course, the fast track that we run, or whether that’s through the qualification in Digital Marketing, people will take their own route based on what their own objectives are. Now, the students who I see who take that training and do so well are the ones that implement. They use the tools, they use the activities, they start to understand it. And if they can, they apply it in their role.

And again, this is the thing, that nothing is perfect. So you will never have the perfect time, tactics, or training. It’s an evolving thing, it’s something that moves day by day. You have to keep on learning. You have to keep on training your team. You have to make sure that you are empowering everybody, including yourself, to perform at the best level ever. And the other thing that you need to make sure of is that when you are training people that you are giving them the ability to implement.

Now, time, tactics, and training, my three essential items that I believe are the foundations in a business, these are things I would urge you to this week, just jot out, have a look at your business, and remember my analogy around the foundations and the breaks, look at all of the different things that happen within the business, like what’s working right now? Look at all your team members, what are they bringing to the business? How are you empowering them to grow and scale themselves? Not just the business, because the two go hand in hand. Look at when you have a project, who can deliver it? Do you have the right talent? And if you get these three things running right, then your business will begin to flourish. And it doesn’t matter that it’s not perfect, because as I say, it’s dynamic, it changes each and every day.

So, I hope that this podcast was useful for you. And remember, you can follow us on all the social media channels, and remember if you type in business consort into Google, you’ll find us at the top of the tree, digitalandsocialmediaacademy.com, and you can check out a whole of array of free resources, guides, and workshops on there, as well as getting a copy of my book, Dynamic Digital Marketing. It’s also available in all good bookshops globally, as well as Amazon.

So happy learning, and remember, time, tactics, and training are the essential core elements that you need to be focusing on to make sure that you are consistently moving forward and keeping your business dynamic.

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