Stop Overthinking Your Small Business Marketing (How to Overcome Analysis Paralysis)

Chelsea:
Okay, Vivian, today we are talking about analysis paralysis and choice overload. Really what we're talking about is going to be how to stop overthinking your marketing. Okay. You're overthinking your marketing. I promise you are. To start this conversation, I want to talk about one of my favorite lessons from college for marketing specifically, which is choice overload. Vivian. Have you ever been to the Cheesecake Factory?

Vivian:
I sure have, you know I have. Actually, the first and only time I've actually been to the Cheesecake Factory, interestingly enough, was in Kuwait. When I went to visit my husband out in Kuwait, that was the only time I've ever gone to a Cheesecake Factory. And I'm almost certain it's the same experience for everybody. When you are talking about being presented with a menu that's about 25 pages long, it's a little overwhelming.

Chelsea:
Yeah, exactly. You know what? Real quick, I shouldn't judge because I'm pretty sure the first time I've ever been to a Cheesecake Factory was in Hawaii. So, the Cheesecake Factory is a wonderful example of choice overload. There's too many pages. They can't even pick what kind of cuisine they serve. You get this feeling as a consumer of overload. There's too many choices. You may not make a purchase or you may end up making a choice and then regretting it, feeling regret over the choice that you've picked.

Vivian:
Yeah. I absolutely agree. I think the interesting part about the Cheesecake Factory is they can't even narrow down like what type of food they want to sell. They're like, we'll just sell everything. Whether you want Asian inspired, whether you want Mexican or whether you want Italian, we'll do a little bit of everything. Which also kind of leads me to think, you know how they say that if you offer everything, it means you're good at nothing. Right. So I think for the Cheesecake Factory, they're always promoting the fact that they sell options. They sell a lot of it, but I do wonder how many people that walk through there feel some level of stress.

Chelsea:
Yes, exactly. I want to say, we know the Cheesecake Factory is really popular, okay? I understand people love the Cheesecake Factory, but you would be lying if you said you didn't feel a little bit of stress looking through that menu.

Vivian:
All right, so this is a call to action for all of our listeners. Tell us, are we alone? Is this something that's normal or is it just Chelsea and I that whenever we go into a cheesecake factory, we feel a little overwhelmed by all of the decisions we have as far as what we can eat that day.

Chelsea:
Exactly. So that is choice overload. Now, I know part of this conversation is going to be about analysis paralysis, which I think greatly relates to choice overload. Vivian, can you talk a little bit about analysis paralysis?

Vivian:
Yeah, I think analysis paralysis, everyone's experienced this to some extent. It's when you are overthinking things and you are stuck in that decision making process. You have so much information that you're kind of going through and you just can't pull the trigger, right? It feels like you can't take action with what you're wanting to do just because you're stuck in that state of constantly looking at the data or looking at the information or reviewing stuff.

Chelsea:
First off, I thought this was called over analysis paralysis. I want to petition that it should be called over analysis paralysis because there is nothing wrong with being analytical and trying to figure it out. It's when you over analyze everything is when you start to have a problem because you can't get anything done. Just saying.

Vivian:
I think the key here is we can do the same thing as small business owners with our marketing because there is just so much out there. I am reading this wonderful book right now that's called Traction. In there, he actually covers that there are 18 marketing channels or marketing opportunities that you have to reach people. He groups them in search engine marketing, promotion or PR, all this stuff, but he's narrowed it down to 18. 18 is a lot. This isn't like narrowing it down into four categories. If there's that many options out there, how many of us are just getting stuck saying, I don't know what my next step is. I feel like I need more information. I want to research it more and Chelsea, you and I have worked together now at the Seasoned Marketer for a couple of years. You see how I operate. I'm almost one of these people. Where you on the other hand, you're like, Hey, let's make a decision. Let's just move forward with it. Let's go on. There's something about me that always feels like, Hey, give me some time to ruminate.

Chelsea:
I want to bring up a statistic that I found. So according to the Small Business Now's Current State of SMB Marketing report, which is basically a report talking about small business and medium sized businesses and what's going on with their marketing, they found that 52 % of businesses surveyed report that they regularly delay or postpone marketing efforts. Most people report a lack of time or knowledge as to why they're delaying their marketing. Y'all, marketing does not have to be a complicated process. We are absolutely overthinking this.

Vivian:
I know why we feel like it is such a big decision. I'm talking about this from a small business owners perspective because I own The Seasoned Marketer. When you have a limited amount of time and you have set resources, you feel like it is your responsibility to do the very best and the very most with what you have. That's the right thing to do. You want to be strategic about the way that you are using your marketing budget. You can't do all the things because you are not GoDaddy. You don't have like endless pockets and you do have to try to get the most out of these things.

But at the end of the day, like Chelsea said, it's not that big of a deal. It's not that serious. There is something to be said with experimenting when it comes to marketing. If you cannot go out there and experiment and try things out, collect data, see if it works for you, how else are you going to move through your marketing options? How else are you going to figure out what does bring in the most amount of customers for your small business?

Chelsea:
You're working with a limited amount of resources, so you want to get it right. If you don't do anything at all, you will never get it right. You have to do something. You have to try.

Vivian:
You're listening to this and you're saying, I don't know, maybe that is me. Maybe it's not me. How would I be able to figure this out? Let's be little detectives. If you're wondering if you have analysis paralysis when it comes to your marketing, do you at the end of the year have a leftover marketing budget?

Did you go into the year saying, I'm going to spend $10,000 on marketing, I'm gonna spend $30,000 on marketing, whatever that number is. Then come December 31st of that year, are you like, I didn't even spend $1,000. I didn't even spend half of what I thought I would. If that's you, then you may have analysis paralysis.

Chelsea:
Another great way to be able to tell if you are experiencing analysis paralysis when it comes to your marketing is, are you waiting for someone to come to you about a marketing opportunity? If you are not being proactive about your marketing, but instead just being reactive and waiting for opportunities to show themselves. Yu're overthinking it.

Vivian:
Yeah, and it may be because you realize you have analysis paralysis. Now you're trying to avoid it at all costs because you don't like the feeling of being overwhelmed and having to make a decision. So I do think those are two really good ways to figure out if you're kind of stuck in that mindset with your marketing.

One of the things that we'll talk about is how to get over that hump, because we want you guys to be very confident when you are making these marketing decisions, regardless of whether or not they flop. Okay. Some marketing initiative not working out or doing exactly what you intended it to do is not necessarily the end of the world. It just means that you tested it, you got data, the data proved it was not going to work, and now you can mark it off your list forever and ever, or maybe in a different setting, it may work down the road. It's information that you can use to make good marketing decisions.

Chelsea:
Vivian, I am so glad that you said that because y'all, you do not need to be afraid to fail in general in your day-to-day life, but also with your marketing. Marketing is, as Vivian said, a learning experience. You're also learning more about your small business. So what we want to do is for the rest of this conversation, we want to talk about ways you can shift your mindset, think differently, and focus on these specifics so that you can feel comfortable with your marketing, you can feel confident, and you can get over this analysis paralysis to work on creating a marketing strategy that works best for your small business. So our first thing, most important piece of info you need to succeed when it comes to marketing is knowledge of your target audience. At the end of the day, that is the most important thing when it comes to marketing is do you know who your target audience is.

I'm going to say something controversial. This is THE most important thing. When it comes to marketing in your small business, you need to know your target audience. I just needed to say it again.

Vivian:
Yeah. Well, so here's what's interesting. Let me reframe it like this. If you are having a problem with making decisions, it's easier to remove yourself from the decision. What I mean by that is, it's not about you. It's about your target audience. So if it's about your target audience, your ideal customer, it means it's not about you. It means that you are always making the decision for the best way to target, to approach, to communicate, to reach these people. That should make your decision a little easier. I'm going to give you a really bad analogy.

Let's say that you are the caretaker for an elderly mother. Those decisions can be hard because you always want to do what's right by your mom...hopefully you like your mother and you want her to be here for a long, time.

Chelsea:
Mom, if you're listening, we love you very much. I don't know what Vivian's...

Vivian:
No, I'm not saying it for my, I'm just saying it should make it pretty clear on some of the decisions that are put in front of you because you're always basing your decisions on what is best for that other person. That's the same way that you should approach your marketing, from the perspective of your business. At the end of the day, you are wanting to do what's best for your ideal customer.

Chelsea:
I'm also going to make a bad analogy along the same lines. Y'all please don't judge us for this. You need to create a persona. You need to write down for your target audience, this is what they enjoy, this is who they are, this is the education level. You need to flesh out and create a person.

Vivian:
Flush out. Not flesh out. Flush out.

Chelsea:
What? Flush? It's not flesh?

Vivian:
I don't think so. Hold on. Google it real quick.

Chelsea:
Okay, I looked it up. According to Google, flesh out and flush out are both correct idioms. You can use both of them. We're both right. Okay. You need to flesh out or flush out an entire person so that you can follow along with, this is who they would be. Kind of like...you started this analogy just saying, kind of like a will. This is what they would want. They're your target audience. So it's kind of like a will.

Vivian:
I see what you're saying. I don't know if this is what you guys signed up for when you decided to tune into this episode, but apparently we have dying mothers and wills and marketing.

Chelsea:
Y'all, maybe forget that analogy. That might have been a little confusing. The point is you need to know, what is your target audience doing on a Friday night? Do they have kids or are they pet parents? You need to really know who they are because that's going to help you get over analysis paralysis. My target audience loves Facebook, but they don't use TikTok, so I'm not even going to bother with TikTok. Or, my target audience loves text messages. So I'm going to do text marketing instead of direct mail marketing, or instead of email marketing.

Vivian:
The struggle is when you're feeling super uncomfortable or like you don't know which direction to go with your marketing, it's probably because of this. The world of marketing, which changes 24/7. Every other week they release a new social media platform and they tell you that this is the new thing and that you can reach so many more people on this thing. You are in a constant state of having to decide whether to incorporate something new. If I incorporate something new, what am I going to have to give up? Right?

Here's an example. Medicare plans are the ones that target people that are over 65. They are like every other business, they just have bigger budgets. However, they also struggle with this. They started doing Facebook ads, but what they found was the Facebook ads were not doing as well as good old fashioned postcards. That is because of what Chelsea just told you guys. If you know who your target audience is, you have to know their preferences. You have to know their lifestyle. You have to know that they enjoy a leisurely stroll to their mailbox, to open something up and they're excited when they get an actual postcard that's well designed and has their name on it and is specific to something that's going on in their life, which is, I just turned a certain age and now I have to sign up for a Medicare plan. So even though they're trying this new stuff out too, and it's converting to some extent, they're not dumping their money into Facebook ads because they know it's not working for them the way that postcards are.

Chelsea:
Absolutely. I have a similar example related to direct mail, but kind of a shift. So Tim and I are pet parents, right? We have two cats. We love them very much. Those are our children. A lot of people my age, their pets are their children, right?

What our vet does is, for the birthday of our cats they'll send postcards saying happy birthday to Smokey, happy birthday to Pup. That is a great example of: they know that emotionally those pets are so important to us that the fact that they sent us a postcard saying happy birthday was wonderful. I love them so much for that.

Vivian:
That's the key, when you get in the psyche of the person that your product or service is going to benefit or can help the most. That's where you start to really make a difference. So this entire discussion on the first point that we wanted to make is if you have analysis paralysis for your marketing, maybe just remind yourself it's not about you. What's in the best interest of my target customer.

Chelsea:
Absolutely. Okay, so our next point, super important for analysis paralysis, and I think something that both of us need to work on, it doesn't need to be perfect.

Vivian:
Yes. It's a constant struggle. I think because we want to put our best foot forward in everything and as small business owners, you should. You should constantly be striving to put your best foot forward. However, I think you can prioritize where it's super important. If you're going to be plastering something on a billboard, you want it to be a little perfect. Okay. Don't be okay with a misspelling. Don't be okay with a crappy photo. There are some things you need to prioritize. Now a reel that maybe the audio was off just a tad. If you're going to sit there and try to perfect that for the next hour, your hour is better spent doing something else. I promise you. Because you're going to upload probably 50 more reels after this one and someone's not going to go back and scroll down to see this one. So I do think that perfection is one thing that does prevent us from being able to make these decisions on what we're doing. If you are struggling with getting any marketing out there because you are tinkering way too much and you just feel like it could be perfect. Go ahead and give yourself the grace to just understand you can always improve as you go.

Chelsea:
I have a great example of this: stories. Stories on Instagram and Facebook. they are great, powerful tools to help you communicate and build a relationship with your audience. I have such a problem with recording stories. I will rerecord a story probably five, six times before I go "Chelsea, it's fine, just post it". I feel like a lot of people maybe shy away from using stories because they have the same problem. I just want to say, first off, stories are temporary. They're there for 24 hours and then they're gone. So it's a perfect way to dabble in social media marketing without it having to be so permanent. Two, maybe the lighting got kind of weird while you're talking or maybe...okay, you need to have audio the entire time. One of the stories I uploaded last week, the audio cut out in the middle of it, but I hadn't noticed that. That's a problem. That is not, it needs to be perfect in the fact that they need to hear you the entire time. My point is if there's little things, it's okay. It's fine.

Vivian:
Yeah, I agree. Let's use an example that's not social media, because I think social media is going to be the one thing that it's a little easier to show up. Let me explain how else this might show up as a small business owner. Let's say that you are an organization that has a really good mission or you have partnered with a local organization. Maybe the sales for November, you're going to donate to the local domestic violence nonprofit in your area. You've never done a press release or you've never contacted the media, but you feel like this would be a really great story to share so that they can help spread the word and people could come by. Therefore your donation could be larger to the nonprofit.

If you don't take the leap and just try it and contact the local newspaper and contact or send that email to your local television station, how are you going to move past this idea of wanting it to be perfect? Cause that's what's holding you up. Here's the thing. You're not going to get comfortable until you actually do the thing. Right. So it's going to feel weird and clunky the first time, it's like rollerblading.

You guys have to know that when it comes to your marketing, the familiarity, that is only going to come whenever you do the thing. All right. So, you cannot wait for perfection when it comes to press releases and stuff like that, because if you've never done it, it's never going to be perfect. I'm telling you right now, you're going to mess up the first one or two times that you do it. Over time, you're going to get familiar with the process. Sometimes it just takes being rejected a couple of times before, or it takes your marketing initiative not working before you tweak it and realize, I can do this. It just means I have to present it in this way.

Chelsea:
Absolutely. Next statement that you'll need to hear if you're dealing with analysis paralysis is: y'all stop comparing yourself. There is nothing wrong with gaining inspiration from others, but if you're not going to do something because you saw someone else do it and there's no way you could compete, or you are going to do something only because you saw someone else do it -that doesn't make sense. They are their own complete person. They are their own complete small business. No small business is the same and you need to do what works best for you and your small business.

Vivian:
If you're struggling with this, let me give you a little life hack. Unfollow those accounts that make you think this. Chelsea and I, when we utilize social media, if we go on Instagram, we try to make an effort not to follow other marketing people on Instagram. The reason is because when we start doing that, for one, it clogs up our feed into seeing only things within our industry and that's not our target audience. We're not out here creating content for other marketing people. We're out here creating content for small business owners. Therefore, our feed should include small business owners because that is the only way that we are going to better understand what their pain points are. That is the only way that we are going to understand what products or what content to create that's really going to move the needle forward for them. It's not going to be by following other marketing people. That's also where the bad case of "comparonitis" comes in when you're like, my gosh, there's so much further ahead than I am. It's always good to have inspiration, to look around and say wow, that's inspiring. Maybe I can take some small piece of that and make it my own. Don't sit there and constantly judge what you're doing against what anyone else is doing. The other point I want to make here, Chelsea, is I think I covered this in a recent Instagram story. You don't have enough data to compare apples to apples or oranges to oranges when you are doing this. So you guys are sitting there comparing your small business to somebody that potentially is getting funding from somewhere else. You potentially are comparing your small business to someone whose business isn't doing well. So you're trying to duplicate something that isn't working for them, but you think because it's nice and polished, it is working for them. Then you're going down that same road.

So the reason I say that is I think it's important for us to just remember that data is just as important when it comes to marketing. If we were to think about this like a sixth grade experiment, your controls, your environment is super important and you can't compare A to B unless they are exactly the same, right? I think it's important for people to realize that you're never going to see the full picture, and so therefore it's just not worth your time to sit there and compare yourself.

Chelsea:
I'm so glad you brought up data because another thing I really want to say is we need to focus less on vanity metrics. It's not about how many followers you have or how many likes a video got or stuff like that. Yes, it's good to know that, but you need to focus your marketing on, am I converting people? Whether that's, am I converting them into sales or am I converting them onto my mailing list? It is about converting people, not how many likes you got on something.

Vivian:
I don't care if this is social media. I don't care if it's billboards. I don't care if it's radio, whatever you are doing to promote your small business, you need to figure out a way to be able to track the success of it, we see this all the time. People say social media is free, and so they're willing to allow it to take up so much of their time. Is that paying off? Is the amount of time that you're investing on Instagram actually converting over to sales? Or if it's not direct sales, is it converting over onto your email list? Where then you're going to be able to massage a relationship and get them to buy down the road. I think people need to think about that a little more seriously with social media. Especially because like you said, they're using vanity metrics to explain away and say, my Instagram's working well because I have an account that's got 50,000 people on it.

Chelsea:
Since we were earlier talking about how social media marketing is not the only marketing out there, I can give you an example of vanity metrics. Let's talk about radio. You put out a radio ad out there and let's say the station comes back and they say, this is how many people listened to the ad. Cool. How many people converted? Another great example of this is, Vivian and I have both done an ad before with the same e-newsletter. They have a tendency to send you this fully fleshed out performance review. This is how many people it was sent to, and this is how many people opened it, and this is the percentage of blah, Cool. It's great to have that information and you definitely want that information. Did it convert? That is what matters.

Vivian:
It really is important to have all of that info when you are making these decisions, because let me connect the dots here. We're coming full circle.

Maybe you have analysis paralysis and you're not feeling confident in your decision making because you have too many options. Going back to what we were talking about at the top of this episode, when you guys are not including a metric to be able to tie it back to the data, if you have that radio ad out there and you didn't create, let's say a specific phone number to promote on the ad that then when those calls come in, you can track them and you could see exactly how many people called in from that one ad. Then you're going to have trouble and you're going to be like, I think it's working. I don't feel confident to continue making the same decision. Every opportunity that you have to promote your business, is it an opportunity for you to build your confidence to know that you are always going to be smart in the sense of tying it back. So then you have the data to make a good decision, and then it's just like a circle that continues.

Chelsea:
Okay, so the final thing that I want to talk about and I think is going to be really important when it comes to analysis paralysis and what we've hinted at throughout this episode is: you don't have to be everywhere.

Vivian:
You can't be everywhere.

Chelsea:
I mean, that's a good point too.

Vivian:
If the book I referred to earlier says there are 18 marketing channels, y'all, do you have it in your budget to be able to try all 18 of them? I'm going to tell you the answer to that is no. Also as a small business owner, who has the time to keep up with 18 different marketing channels? What you do have to do is figure out which ones work best for your small business. Don't be afraid to lean into the ones that are working well. I'll say that's what's going to build your confidence up too. Getting really good at being able to determine that earlier on is going to be what allows you to experiment a little more. Also, you know that the money you're investing in these marketing initiatives is going to return some type of revenue.

Chelsea:
This is what you need to know if you are struggling with analysis paralysis in terms of your marketing for your small business. You need to have clear knowledge of your target audience. You need to really, really know who they are. You need to remember that it doesn't need to be perfect. I mean, some things do need to be nice and polished, but sometimes you have a little wiggle room, right? Also stop comparing yourself to others. It's apples to oranges, you don't know what's going on with them. Stop comparing yourself. You do not have to be everywhere. That is so important. Y'all, you do not have to be everywhere. You don't have to try all the marketing strategies. Just focus on what works best for your small business and your target audience. Lastly, let's focus a little less on vanity metrics and instead focus on "am I converting people"?

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