Little Things Make a Huge Difference
Recently, my son noticed a small coolant leak from the upper radiator hose of his wife’s vehicle. He was visiting with us, so he and I took a look at it. We decided to stop the steady drip by adding a different hose clamp. The connection leaked less but it was not completely dry. It didn’t seem serious so we decided that he would keep an eye on the coolant level for the next few days.
The next week, the car died completely as his wife was driving home from work. After having the vehicle towed to their home it was determined that the alternator had failed. The estimate for the repair from the dealership was $1300! They determined that the alternator was ruined by coolant dripping from that small leak that we noticed a few days prior. We later discovered that the leak was caused by a plastic connector that cost about $40. A fractured $40 part resulted in $1300 in electrical damage.
Sometimes small parts can cause even more catastrophic damage. On January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded just 73 seconds after launch. As millions of horrified viewers watched via live TV coverage, 7 crew members lost their lives. After a thorough investigation, the cause of the explosion was identified as an O-ring failure on the right rocket booster. This relatively small, but crucial part could not handle the pre-launch temperature of 31 degrees. Apparently, program engineers warned NASA leadership of the potential for failure of this part. However, the NASA management estimated there was only a 1 in 100,000 chance of shuttle failure. They went ahead with the fateful launch that shattered the lives of 7 families and shocked the world.
Even wise King Solomon wrote in ancient times about the importance of the little things, “Catch for us the foxes, the little foxes that ruin the vineyards, our vineyards that are in bloom.” - (S. of Sol. 2:15)
Little Things Matter in Sports
Small things can also make a huge difference in sports. The Daytona 500 is the feature event in NASCAR racing every year. After 500 miles of intense racing, Denny Hamlin won the 2020 Daytona 500 by only .014 seconds. Winning by less than a second earned Hamlin over $2 million and one of the most sought-after trophies in motor racing history!
Little Things Matter with Money
$100 isn’t a lot of money these days. That amount won’t even support gourmet coffee fans’ daily beverage purchases for one month. If a 30-year old adult instead decided to save $100 each month, at age 67 they would have accumulated about $44,400. However, if they invested that amount in good mutual funds each month, with the average rate of return of the S&P 500, he or she would accumulate $827,550 to fund their retirement.
Little Things Matter with Time
It’s a well-known fact that each of us is allotted 24 hours each day. This daily amount doesn’t vary even one second between the person who experiences long-term success and the underachieving person who envies them. What differentiates most achievers in any area from everyone else is simply how they choose to use their 168 hours each week. If you want to dig deeper into some basic yet important concepts of time-usage, I would recommend a book written by Laura Vanderkam, 168 HOURS: YOU HAVE MORE TIME THAN YOU THINK.
Little Things Matter with Our Habits
Author and behavioral expert James Clear, in his best-selling book, ATOMIC HABITS wrote, “Similarly, a slight change in your daily habits can guide your life to a very different destination. Making a choice that is 1 percent better or 1 percent worse seems insignificant at the moment, but over the span of moments that make up a lifetime these choices determine the difference between who you are and who you could be. Success is the product of daily habits – not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.”
Many years ago, the late Jim Rohn taught the same principle, “Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. You don’t fail overnight. Instead, failure is a few errors in judgment, repeated every day.”
What does all this have to do with Inbound Marketing?
Glad you asked! In his book, 3 MONTHS TO NUMBER 1, SEO expert Will Coombe warns readers concerning what he calls “The Magic Bullet Fallacy”. “Let’s get one thing straight. No single thing is going to rank your site number one. Not even a major component will. SEO is about the consistency of implementation, ticking the small boxes, and eliminating anything that might hold you back. That’s genuinely it.”
Inbound Marketing involves Knowledge.
Inbound experts will tell you this. There are a lot of seemingly small moving pieces that make up the whole of any effective marketing program. An appealing, strategic website, the right keywords, on-page and off-page optimization, links, tags, relevant content, and more are all essential parts of the picture. You and your team must be familiar with these basic elements while continuing to learn more. New technology and tools are constantly being developed. Much of what we know today will be obsolete in 5 years. Stay current.
Inbound Marketing requires Action.
Knowing the basics of inbound is not enough. As best-selling author Tony Robbins says, “You see, in life lots of people know what to do, but few people actually do what they know. Knowing is not enough! You must take action.”
Inbound marketing is not a “set-it-and-forget-it” deal. There are steps that the best teams and companies utilize to succeed in the digital space.
1. Create
Reaching your audience and growing your business requires clear goals. You’ll create and refine inbound and outbound marketing strategies that everyone on your outreach team embraces.
2. Execute
Then things get harder. You and your team must identify the lead measures required to execute your strategy and reach your goals. These are those smaller steps that move you forward.
3. Measure
Someone has said, “We measure what matters.”. You and your team have determined your daily and weekly priorities. Now you need to track them. Excellent tools are abundant like Google Analytics to help you see if your efforts are working.
4. Adjust
Every battle plan changes as soon as the battle starts. Your strategy and tactics don’t have to be written in stone. If something isn’t working, you and your team can make changes and then measure again.
5. Repeat
The best teams don’t see this cycle as drudgery, but more of a flow. Your process becomes more habitual and starts to produce results. As you see this happening, you need to make sure that you don’t get complacent and lose that momentum you worked so hard to gain.
Inbound Marketing rewards Consistency.
One of the hallmarks of a solid Inbound and SEO strategy is consistency. Consistency with remarkable, quality content. Content creation is a lot of work, but that is what verifies your company’s authority and attracts visitors to your website. Missing a few scheduled weekly blogs or videos post might not seem important, but those gaps in your program can hinder your progress.
In his 1989 article on sociological theory entitled “The Mundanity of Excellence”, Dan Chambliss wrote, “The most dazzling human achievements are, in fact, the aggregate of countless individual elements, each of which is, in a sense, ordinary.”
As the Chinese proverb states “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now”.