Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” is often misinterpreted. I remember in high school reading it and becoming fond of the meaning I thought it had which was about traveling down the road less traveled with a sense of independence and courage. In fact though, over time I learned the real meaning was not that one road was less traveled, but moreover that sometimes we randomly chose any road and just take it, wing it. We may tell people afterward we have been successful because we took the road less traveled “…and that has made all the difference”, but sometimes we just pick a road randomly and hope for the best.
A lot of companies do this with their marketing efforts; they follow a fad or listen to a sales pitch and don’t really analyze their audience needs first. I am not saying that making a gut decision is a bad thing, many gut decisions prove very fruitful, but I would say make sure you are informed enough to know why you are doing something. Take for example social media campaigns, don’t just create a Facebook page for your business-to-business product when your audience may be better targeted on LinkedIn. Along the same lines, don’t start four different social pages and then never update them. Have a plan, don’t overkill the planning on testing new ideas though, sometimes you just have to go out and try something new.
Of course you should maintain a level of everyday marketing, that is researched with a concerted effort, managed and tracked, whether that is an email marketing or an online advertising campaign; but perhaps adding in a blogger strategy makes sense too or trying to utilize something like Periscope that is a live-streaming app that makes it easy for you to broadcast message through your smartphone.
You can keep traveling down a road and every now and then veer off to see a new sight. Or like Yogi Berra once said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it!”
