Page 24 - Voices.June.2016final

Marketing Lessons from the Beach
by Janet Hager
Summertime is
here. Time to hit the
beach and enjoy all it has to offer: Clarity. Calm.
Cool. (That last one might be restricted to
Oregon, where the beach is almost never warm.)
Isak Dineson said, “The cure for anything is
salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea.” Here are a few
marketing cures from the sea.
Be Consistent - The ocean doesn’t send
one wave up on shore, let it curl over and crash,
and then stop. It keeps doing it, over and over.
Not only that, it manages to do it in a way that is
both the same every time, and also different. You
know that every time a wave comes barreling in
toward shore, it’s going to curl over and crash.
But you also know there will be something a little
bit different about it each time. So the waves are
always worth watching.
Your marketing needs to be like that too.
You need to consistently be in touch with your
people, one way or another, and it needs to be
recognizable as you pretty much every time,
but at the same time, you need to offer a little
something different each time, or people will
get bored and stop watching.
Be Relentless - Every time you show up
at the shore, the ocean is there, doing its thing.
It’s doing it when the beach is full of people, and
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it’s doing it when nobody is watching.
Figure out what works for your business, for
your business development, and keep on doing
it, regardless of what else is going on. Are you
just getting your business started, and short on
clients at the moment? Invent a case study for
yourself and work on that as if it was a client. Is
your plate so full you can’t manage it all? Work
the extra hours or outsource some of it, but don’t
forget to keep up your business development
efforts, or you’ll end up with a lull down the road.
Some months you have to devote more time to
the work, and some months you have to devote
more time to business development; things can
flux. Just don’t let them stall.
Keep doing your thing, so that whenever the
right person shows up, you’re ready to go.
(I’m not saying you should rail away at wind-
mills that aren’t working. Use your common
sense.)
Be True to Who You Are - The ocean is
always salt water. Salt water is at the core of what
it means to be the sea. When tourists show up
who want fresh water, the ocean doesn’t suddenly
change and offer fresh water. Nope. It just keeps
on being the salty sea. Sooner or later the people
who want fresh water go find themselves a lake
to jump in.
Likewise, when you run up against a potential