LITTLE CROW MARKETING

Outside of work I’m an avid gardener. I spend my free time digging about in dirt, planting seeds and dealing with pests like slugs, snails and caterpillars. As such, I have my plants and my business on the brain most of the time. Whilst gardening the other day this analogy hit me as I was tending to these tiny seedlings I hadn’t thought would grow at all.

Consistency is like germination.

I planted 24 red bell pepper seeds with seedling compost and put them in my greenhouse. I didn’t think they would grow. They were seeds from a supermarket pepper I had prepared and dried myself. I planted them alongside a number of other types of vegetable, and I watched as weeks passed and the rest of the vegetables started to sprout. The peppers didn’t.

I started doubting myself. ‘These won’t grow’, ‘if they were going to work, they would have started to come up by now’, ‘I’m going to have to go out and buy replacement plants’. But I was wrong. It took a month for the sprouts to show. But all that time these little seedlings had been progressing. Their seed casings had opened, roots had begun to grow down into the soil – all progress I couldn’t see from the surface!

Social media acts in this same way. You might be posting content, engaging with potential clients and nurturing those relationships without seeing any visible results – but that doesn’t mean it’s not working. Consistency is important because marketing, especially social media, takes time. It takes consistency and determination before you’re going to see the results you want, whether that is the size of your following, clients signing up or products being sold.

You have to keep doing the work, knowing that some progress can’t be seen. You might plant 12 strategies in the hopes of them growing into success – and yes some of those strategies might not germinate, out of 12 planted you might only see 6 be fruitful – but you won’t know which until they sprout. Don’t dig those seeds up early to see if they’re working, because you won’t see it turn into a full plant.

What current strategies do you have in place for your business?