Solid marketing can do wonderful things for your business, but it can be easy to get distracted and waste your time.
Similar to my recent post “Can you speed it up?“, people can often do things in marketing that have the opposite of the intended effect. In the book “Trying Not To Try“, the author shares a thought from Chinese philosopher Mecius:
“In the state of Song there was a man who, worried because his sprouts of grain were not growing fast enough, decided to go out to his field and pull on them. Without any idea of what he’d done, he returned home and announced to his family, ‘I am really exhausted today, I’ve been out in the fields helping the sprouts to grow!’ Alarmed, his sons rushed out to the fields to take a look and saw that all the sprouts had shriveled and died.” This episode is the basis of a modern Chinese saying, “pulling on the sprouts to help them grow,” which refers to any effort that has thoroughly counterproductive results.
In the world of marketing I see this come up in a few ways:
- People clicking their own results in the search engine to try to rank better.
- People buying keyword-rich domain names (like high-quality-dress-shirts.com) and redirecting them to their site to help with ranking.
Neither of those will work at all — you’re just wasting your time and money.
The worst thing I often see is people going full steam ahead without any kind of plan. They’ll be posting on Facebook 20x daily when their main audience is on LinkedIn or they’ll start spending money running Google Ads without tightening up their website first.
Those make them like the man pulling sprouts in the field. They’ll work hard and be proud of their effort, but they’ll actually be making things worse.
Do your research, develop a plan, and then make sure that all subsequent efforts are in line with what you’ve put together.
