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Hey zen master!!

Wait for it . . . . .

Why is it that success is so much sweeter if you have to wait for it?

You know that feeling. 

There’s both anticipation and fear of failure when you work on something that you know will take time to bear fruit. 

And waiting for your marketing to kick in can be brutally frustrating. You do your research, you make a game plan, you go to work. 

And you start looking for results. Almost immediately.

Where are the f-ing results!?!?

Let’s be honest . . . for most businesses, growth hacking is total BS. It may work well for a startup, for a while, but eventually there’s a point where you graduate –  to inbound, to demand generation, to building a brand. 

And brand building . . . well, it takes time.

Building a brand is akin to planting a bunch of seeds and diligently watering and nourishing them, patiently awaiting the gratifying sight of those initial little green shoots breaking through the soil.

In brand building, there are simply no guarantees. No crystal magic 8 ball.

So imagine my exuberance when I got this email from a client just yesterday!

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If you look closely, you’ll see they hit their goal for the year in mid-July!! That’s significant, because they’ve never hit the goal before – not in any month of any year.

Now there’s a backstory of course. 

Motive3 is not a demand generation company. And we don’t do performance marketing. We’re brand strategists, focused mostly on messaging and storytelling.  

In other words, we help companies plant seeds (called key messages). And water them consistently (with content).

And that’s what brand building is all about. Consistency. Consistency. Consistency.

It’s not always easy. It takes time, effort, and energy. And even with the best planning and strategy in place, you never know what’s going to grow or when it will bear fruit.

But that’s why this client success story is so meaningful.

We started our journey with this client in 2018 – a little over 5 years ago!! – with a simple workshop designed to get to a core message.

Then we started thinking about how, when, and where to take their message to market (i.e. we started burying seeds). We tried different things: we updated their website messaging to humanize their offer, created videos that demystified their methodology, and put a system in place to accelerate content.

Don’t get me wrong. There were plenty of other successes along the way. But still, we just kept watering those seeds. 

Why am I telling you this?

Because . . . patience, young grasshopper! (I sure hope you’re old enough to get that reference.) 

Tell your story consistently. And be patient. 

Little by little, a little becomes a lot.

I can’t resist another metaphor . . . 

It’s kinda like a bicycle. If you stop pedaling, the bike will eventually fall over. Maybe not right away, and not on a downhill. But once you face the tiniest uphill. Forget it. (Ahem, not even Neilsen Powless can get anywhere without pedal power. That’s for all you Tour de France obsessed folks out there. And if you’re not obsessed yet, just go to Netflix and watch Tour de France: Unchained).

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Thanks for reading to the end! Happy weekend.

Ginger

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