Good Marketing Is Like a Good Golf Swing
“Stop thinking about hitting the ball. Swing right through it instead.”
These words from my dad were one of the first lessons I ever got in golf.
I didn’t understand them at all. Wasn’t HE hitting the ball? What was I doing wrong?
It was only after a summer of practice that they started to click into place.
Your natural inclination, if you haven’t played much, is to just walk up there and whack at the ball…
But that moment of contact is just a FRACTION of what a good swing is.
There’s the coiling, and the shifting of weight onto your rear leg during the backswing. There’s the acceleration when you let your wrists turn over on the downswing and the momentum carrying you into a photo-worthy follow through.
Great golfers understand this. The ball just gets in the way of the movement. Go up there and just try to “hit the ball,” and you’ll slap at it and lose all momentum.
In a lot of ways, amateur marketers have similar thinking:
They’re so obsessed with reaching new eyeballs that they forget about the other parts of the process.
Good marketing is like a good golf swing:
- You need a “backswing” to showcase your credibility, competence, and prime interested visitors to become leads
- You need a “downswing” that captures interest, overcomes potential objections, and nurtures leads
- You need a “follow-through” that continues to build relationships, up-sell, cross-sell, and boost customer loyalty
Getting the customer (making impact with the ball in our analogy) just happens. It’s seamless. And if one shot doesn’t work out, you’re always tweaking different parts of the swing to become more consistent.
New customers are great. But focusing so much on them — at the expense of other elements of marketing — gives you tunnel vision. Those costly PPC campaigns or mass cold emails might work from time to time. But they’re inefficient, unpredictable, and unsustainable.
Wouldn’t it be better to build a system that reaches new people, builds relationships, and closes deals from end to end?
Maybe it’s time to stop trying to hit the ball.
Maybe it’s time to start swinging.