Violent Effort in Marketing

One lesson I have had to learn repeatedly is that when it comes to marketing, the answer is often just violent effort. Marketing is the closest (legal) thing there is to printing money. If you have a product that can meet demand, and you find a marketing strategy that consistently works, you can repeat that strategy ad nauseam until it ceases to work. Obviously, by the time it stops working you should be prepared with several backup plans which you have been testing in the mean time, but that’s not the point of this particular post.

In this context, the obvious question is how do you find these “printing money” marketing strategies? The answer is sheer violent effort. You never know what works until you try, and the only barrier between you and an egregious number of attempts is often the amount of effort you’re willing to put in. The wonderful thing about this strategy is that it often results in exponential, rather than linear returns.

Perhaps you are a social media expert who is experimenting with email campaigns. You’re going to be very bad at first, there’s no way around it. You simply CAN’T be good right away. However, if you test five campaigns a day with different (ideally similar) audiences for 100 days, and try to consistently improve based on what works and what doesn’t, you will no longer be very bad. It’s that simple. Even if your competition starts out with exceptional skill, if they’re running 3 campaigns a week, and you’re running five a day, you will bridge the gap in a shockingly low amount of time. At the end of 100 days, you will know what works, and the dividends will speak for themselves. At day 1, you will probably get zero clicks, at day 50, you might get 50 clicks, but at day 100, you might get 10,000. The exponential growth in measurable results is directly attributed to the exponential growth in ability. How does one achieve this exponential growth in ability?

Violent effort.