Does Your Brand Have the Patience Needed To Thrive Today?

The bad news: your customer has more control of their relationship with brands than ever before. The good news: brands can build a deeper relationship with their customers than any time since the local General Store existed – with a better understanding of what they want and how to motivate them. The worst news: it takes time.

Most businesses are not used to having patience. They are beholden to the quarterly report, the 30-day report, the weekend sales, the boss's expectations, the stock exchange and many other things that make them constantly look over their shoulders or for the next big thing. Marketing campaigns only last so long, slogans come and go. CMOs come and go. Expectations run high. Time runs short.

The world we live and work in is going faster all the time, too. Technology changes so fast. New social channels pop up constantly. Google changes its algorithm seemingly weekly. Mobile adoption grows at an ever accelerating rate. And to take advantage of these new things, companies need to show some patience.

In fact, with social media and customers taking more control of their relationships with brands, companies need to learn patience like never before. Many companies are jumping into social media, cause marketing, content marketing and many other current ways of connecting with customers. However, many of them are giving up before they really have a chance to accomplish something great. It takes time to build a community.

Driving traffic to your site by creating content takes a while, both to build up a decent amount of content and a decent sized audience. Creating a viable blog with a lots of readers takes time. Seeing the benefits of your company going green takes time. Companies are not used to taking the time it takes to make these things really begin to work.

I find very few are willing to put in the time and effort to really make it pay off for them. It's not that they don't want to do the work, it's that they don't see the results fast enough. That's what makes all the ROI talk of these things frustrating. It's not something that is easy to figure out short term. In fact, in a recent blog I related how I bought a new car because of a social media program nearly a year and a half after the program. They no longer do the program and my purchase never figured into their ROI.

This is very understandable. A good business owner makes decisions on what is working and what isn't, adjusts what they're doing and moves on. It's how successful businesses have always run. But in this new world order where customer is king and queen, with so much data, research and connectivity in their pocket at any given moment, the brand leader's vision needs to be more far-sighted. It's hard to do, especially in very competitive waters. Yet, it needs to be done. A little patience could prove to be the winning strategy in the long run.

How is your business doing? Do you have the patience to make this new world work for you? Can you afford to wait and see if some of these strategies pay off big time down the road? Can you afford not to?

Mike McClure, impatiently waiting for patience