atience, they say, is a virtue, and it’s true. Thoughtful observation leads to creative marketing theories. When marketing professionals take the time to process successful, or unsuccessful, campaigns, they develop an intuitive understanding of their advertising channels. In turn, this intuition allows them to anticipate potential client likes and dislikes. The marketing process becomes an organic outgrowth of careful cultivation.
Patience, however, cannot be your sole marketing methodology. Excessive patience can foster inaction. A “wait and see” approach is often risk averse, and without at least some risk taking in marketing, you’ll fail to learn valuable insights that help you hone your messaging in an everchanging and often clouded future.
They don’t tend to say it, but impatience is also a virtue. If patience is careful cultivation, impatience is the fledgling bird that jumps out of the nest. There are only so many ways to learn how to fly, after all. Marketing is similar in that leaps of faith are required. Eagerness to test various strategies is predicated on impatience. It may not always be graceful, but it is how you move forward.
Effective marketing strategies are as much about understanding your failures as they are about winning new clients. Learning what doesn’t work informs decisions that ultimately do work. The more you test, the more you learn. The more you learn, the more comprehensive your strategy becomes.
Invigorating your team with a similar mindset will create an action-oriented mentality. They may be running a marathon, but to go the marketing distance, they should be sprinting between each mile marker. Each sprint should end with an assessment and a recalibration of methodology before starting the next leg of the journey.
The key to approaching a marketing strategy with both patience and impatience is in balancing eagerness with observation. Observation without action leads only to unproven theories and untested ideas. Similarly, action without reflection doesn’t add crucial meaning to failures. When you and your team embrace a truly impatient patience, you’ll be able to test real-world variables in creative ways that ultimately bolster the momentum and effectiveness of your entire marketing strategy.
