When a baby elephant is born, they weigh about 200 pounds.
Granted, you can’t blow them over, but they are pretty small.
I bet you could put a leash on one and guide it around pretty easily.
It won’t pull any cars.
It won’t scare anyone away, but you can manage it pretty well.
Marketing is Like a (baby) Elephant
A lot of folks come to us and think they need to buy a giant elephant.
The 5,000 pound kind.
And honestly, they have no idea how much that costs, they have no idea how to train and no ideas how to guide a 5,000 pound marketing elephant.
A 5,000 pound elephant (or team of them) might actually just run over your business.
Most likely, they will trample all over what you’ve worked on, not helping your business or making anyone feel good.
Most people think they need an adult elephant, but your job, in many cases, is to simply buy and manage the baby elephant you can afford.
If you feed that cute little bugger, then it will grow up into the beast you need in a short amount of time.
Maybe you’re not ready for a giant.
Maybe you are.
Start Small and Grow
I take the principles I use in marketing from the masters:
— Practice with bullets before you send bombs.
In “Great by Choice” by Jim Collins, he talks about how the greatest companies of our era chose to practice with
bullets (small investments) before they invested in bombs (the big bets).
You might be thinking that now is the time to get out of being a zookeeper (marketing your business) and that’s the wrong answer.
You might be thinking that it’s time to buy a herd of elephants (going gangbusters for the first time) and that’s the wrong answer too.
What you need to do is buy a baby elephant, feed it every day, and grow it into the marketing beast that you need.
If you’d like to learn more about an amazing new program we’re rolling out to help you raising baby elephants into beasts, grab a time here and we can talk about what you need.
For more information on best marketing practices, check out my previous blog, “A Marketing Lesson from The Smashing Pumpkins.”