When it comes to marketing your business, choosing where to focus your advertising budget can be a challenge. Professionals will argue over which form of marketing is most important based off of your business’s size, industry, and budget. In the end, however, how well you execute your advertising is just as important as what methods of advertising you decide to use. If the execution part seems difficult, think of it this way: Have you used the left side of your brain, as well as the right side?
A person who is "left-brained" is often said to be more logical, analytical, and objective. In a nutshell, these people do math for fun—that’s a joke of course because no one does math for fun. A person who is "right-brained" is said to be more intuitive, thoughtful, and subjective. These are generally those artsy, creative people. When it comes to marketing, we need to be both left-brained, as well as right-brained.
The way I see it, left-brained is used for checking off all of the boxes. It’s almost like seeing everything as a checklist. For instance, a marketing department wanting to use their company website to market their business might ask themselves the following questions: Do we have a website? Is it functional? Is it built up to the current SEO standards? Is it being found on the first page of Google? Right-brained thinking would be more like: Is our website attractive and unique? Does it tell a story? Is it creative and engaging? Proper balance between the two sides leads to a well-rounded marketing effort.
I once had a client call me, asking why he wasn’t receiving more business. He explained that he had recently built a website which listed his business phone number and address. “I’m not receiving any calls. What’s the deal?” he asked. I pulled up his website and there it was, a one page catastrophe. Remember those awful websites from the ‘90s? The ones full of twinkling, bright colored text? You know, a black background with the business name written in Comic Sans? Yeah, that’s what my client had just paid a web designer for just months prior to our phone call. If I remember correctly, there was a photo, about a paragraph of body copy, and then the contact information down below. That was the whole website. “But the website is up, it has my contact information, and I’m even being found on the first page of Google for certain keywords,” the client argued, “What gives?” Ah-ha, he is thinking with the left side of his brain. He is checking those special boxes that tell him he is doing everything right.
So I posed the question, “What story does your website tell?” A moment of silence. “Well, I guess it’s not telling any type of story,” he responded. Not that I said this to him, but his website was telling a story unintentionally—a bad one at that. But I went ahead and explained to him that checking the boxes isn’t enough. I asked him, “If you came across your website, would you want to do business?” Another moment of silence. “Well, I guess not,” he finally answered. I used the right-brained/left-brained analogy with him and explained that he needs to redo his website: add new pages, pick new fonts, write better content, and much more. To some, that may seem harsh. But it’s the truth. You can’t always look at things analytically. “Well, I have a website and I’m showing up on Google, therefore I can go focus on other marketing efforts now” is not the type of attitude you can have. It goes deeper than that. Marketing goes deeper than that.
Yes, you do need to check all of the boxes as you execute your business’s marketing efforts. But you also need to look at things through your clients’ eyes. I know this may seem like a surprise to some, but website viewers aren’t always going to view your website’s page source in order to make sure that you have properly optimized your website. “Do they have all of the proper meta tags in place? No? Well I’m not buying from them then,” said no one ever. What they are going to want to see is an engaging, interactive, and compelling website that tells a story.
The left-brained/right-brained idea applies to so much more than just a website. It applies to your Social Media marketing, your PPC campaign, your SEO efforts, everything. Having a business Facebook page and posting consistently isn’t enough. Are your posts compelling? Do they draw in your audience? On Twitter, are your tweets worthy enough to be retweeted? The examples are endless.
If your business is struggling with your marketing efforts, try this: check all of the boxes on the checklist, and after, dive deeper. If you do not have a good content writer on your team who can write creative web content and social media posts, hire one. If you’re advertising in a visual realm, but don’t feel the generic stock photos you are sharing are good enough, hire a skilled graphic designer who can create amazing visuals. Overall, remember this: use all of your brain, not just one side. Marketing is more complex than you might think.