Is your business suffering from functional freeze?

You are a hardworking small or micro business but can't get any traction with social media or digital marketing to really scale up. Or worse, you can't come up with any viral ideas, no money for ads and your competitors are catching up.

Your business may well be in functional freeze.

You can picture the freeze state of the business as a deer in headlights. You are great at your business but the marketing part is not your zone of excellence so you try to ignore it.?

Then the creativity totally freezes up because you realise your business is in danger and start moving into panic / survival / 'shove anything out there' in order to survive.

Just as the deer does when it experiences the threat of a car.

What is a Business Freeze State?

It doesn't matter if it's a one- or 15 or 150-people business. A freeze state happens in business when

• nobody has the full responsibility of doing the marketing
• or all the marketing responsibility has gone to a junior person
• no systems or processes in place to:

a) maximise creativity

b) professionalise processes

c) optimise results systematically

d) improve productivity

e) impact the bottom line

Marketing Consistency v Marketing Virality

Even if you manage to get one or two pieces of content to go viral, you return to a baseline haphazard marketing approach.

When you can't or don't want to set up the marketing systems that guarantee systematic results, you can get stuck in a freeze state.

Functional freeze is a blended state where we're within a freeze state, but we are also capable and able to function.

Rather than being in complete shut down, we're present enough to go through the motions.

Does anyone in your team relate to these frustrated feelings?

Functional business freeze looks like:

• feeling unconfident and lacking skills but going through the motions
• no real strategy but doing your best
• excessive scrolling in search of new ideas
• overwhelmed by all the options from social media to email marketing, from ads to PR, from SEO to podcasting, from Twitter to Tiktok
• getting lost in 'research' for long periods of time and then 'coming to'

Many businesses in functional freeze appear to be doing very well. They may be high performers but they struggle to actually get any marketing results. They struggle to focus on two or three areas where they can really double down on securing outstanding and consistent results.

The business owners might also feel like competitors are gaining ground. The competitors might not be anywhere near as good at helping customer and clients with their problem but because the competitors are spending all their time on social media, they are winning all the valuable attention, hearts and minds.

It's helpful to think of the business functional marketing freeze as a prolonged state of shock.

Classic Objections

"How can I be as brilliant as I am but that shyster round the corner is earning a fortune cos they are always on social rather than satisfying the customer"

"I'm too old to learn social media"

"Our nephew can do it. He's a Geography graduate."

"We can't afford to do it properly. We've no budget. We're bootstrapping."

"We don't have time to learn all the intricacies of each marketing option."

The Big Freeze Solutions

There are solutions for all budgets:

1. Marketing coach = 1 or 2 hours per month
2. Plug-in Marketing Team =? Outsource some or all marketing tasks and projects at a rate that respects cash flow AND delivers results

Stay in Touch

If you found this helpful follow

@FinWycherley for more

I write threads / blogs every few days on how to improve your small business marketing without much of a budget.

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