Focus On One Thing
Apple CEO Tim Cook said that “striving for being the best, for only doing the best products, for staying focused” was a core principle that Steve Jobs instilled in the company. He said he could put every product the company ships on a small table. Not surprising, Apple’s sales were $274 billion last year.
An example of a company spread too thin is the floundering web services company Yahoo. Executives and consultants acknowledge the company lacked vision and focus – trying to be too many things to too many people. To survive, Yahoo was forced to be acquired by Verizon Media.
Even internet giant Google occasionally fails. In 2011, Google+ replaced predecessor Google Buzz, their social media platform designed to compete with Facebook. Despite a massive marketing campaign, low engagement (90% of the users managed no more than 5 seconds on the social platform) Google+ was quietly retired.
Stop Multitasking Your Marketing
It’s said that multitasking is the opportunity to screw up more than one thing at a time. Today’s marketing options can be more tempting than an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord. This is self-control time. Before you spread your marketing budget randomly across digital media, social media, direct and traditional channels – press stop.
Compile a list of each current marketing activity. It’s likely that not every channel is getting it done – cut those that aren’t. Using too many channels has the same effect as no marketing.
Then focus on one channel at a time and measure the results. A sound strategy is to do one thing well before moving to the next. Take Tim Cook’s advice: “It’s easy to add. It’s hard to edit. It’s hard to stay focused. And yet we know we’ll only do our best work if we stay focused – the hardest decisions we make are all the things not to work on.”
