Those who have worked with me before will likely know that I come from a ‘horsey’ background and while it might seem irrelevant, I credit much of my career success to it. Horses (or any animals, really) will teach you plenty of lessons that apply to life and business but horses are pretty unique.
They teach you responsibility and the necessity of doing the hard, foundational yards. The sheer volume of yard work, tack cleaning, feeding, grooming and other maintenance required to spend 30 minutes doing the cool stuff is hard to communicate using publicly acceptable vocabulary.
They school you in unpredictability and coping/pivoting skills that are essential to survival in the start-up, or indeed any business, world. No changing trends in the marketplace can match three-quarters of a ton of racehorse suddenly deciding to turn left at full gallop for teaching ‘stickability’.
Above all, you will learn resilience. Because if you don’t have that, you don’t have a career in horses. You’ll start out tough – able to take to the inevitable knocks, falls and injuries that will come your way. A lot of people take this as the definition of resilience and in the early part of your career, it probably does count as such.
But horses force you to compete only ever against yourself. It’s as much a mental game as a physical one, perhaps more so. As a result, you grow into a growth mindset and slowly come to realise what resilience really means.
It does not mean being mentally and physically tough enough to withstand the blows that come your way. Because eventually there will always be a blow that is big enough to wipe you out. Real resilience means developing the skill set of managing yourself, building awareness of your emotional climate and how that is driving your decisions. It’s not pushing forward at any cost, it’s figuring out first whether the juice is worth the squeeze. It’s playing to your strengths and applying focus strategically forward. It’s all about developing ‘feel’.
We talk a lot in horsey circles about ‘feel’. To me, it’s an essential component in any successful career with horse but in marketing too. In the saddle, ‘feel’ is what tells you which strategy to choose in the moment and when – and those moments come fast so you better guess right!
Feel cannot be taught, but it can be learned, and it is a hallmark of tremendously successful marketers every bit as much as riders. In riding, it is all about the connection between you and the horse – understanding each other’s wants and needs and how best to journey together towards fulfilling mutual goals. At its absolute best, marketing is no different!
Building a relationship with your marketplace requires ‘feel’. Having a connection with the actual people in that industry or group. Being interested in human behaviour and using your data analysis to better understand what you do that they respond to and why. Being original in the content you create while demonstrating that you know who you are as a company, what your values are and what you exist to do.
Of course, marketing can be functional without those things. It can exist as a series of activities on a content calendar somewhere that people simply carry out without too much thought because these activities are something that you do. But it can be so much more than that. The return on the investment that you make in marketing can be much higher. It’s really up to you.
Comentários