Anyone who’s ever laced up their trainers and pounded (or plodded) the pavement will probably know how easy it is it is to compare yourself to everyone else when you’re running. There’s always someone running further, someone running faster, and someone who seems to make it all look effortless while you’re wondering why your legs feel like concrete. Until, in the end, if you’re not careful, you stop focusing on your own run and start worrying about theirs.
Businesses often do the same thing with communications.
You see another company posting every day, someone else seems to be constantly appearing in the media, or a competitor launches a new campaign, hosts another event or suddenly seems to be everywhere online. Before you know it, you’re wondering whether you’re falling behind and whether you should be doing more too.
However, you rarely know what is happening behind the scenes. You don’t know how big their team is, what their budget looks like, what their objectives are, what resources they have available or, importantly, whether all that activity is actually delivering results. You’re looking at their finish line without knowing what race they’re running – and their strategy isn’t your strategy.
More isn’t necessarily better
There is a tendency in marketing and PR to equate activity with success – more posts, more coverage, more events, more followers, more campaigns, but being busy isn’t necessarily the same as being effective.
A business might be posting three times a day because social media is a major part of its customer acquisition strategy. Another might only need to communicate a couple of times a week because its business comes primarily through referrals, partnerships or a long sales cycle. One might need to be highly visible in the media, while another might benefit much more from building credibility within a very specific industry or community. Neither is necessarily doing it ‘better’, they are simply running different races.
The challenge is that we only tend to see the visible part. We see the LinkedIn posts, the media coverage, the events and the announcements, but we don’t see the strategy behind them or the results they are generating. Comparing your communications activity to someone else’s can therefore be a little like comparing your running pace to someone you’ve spotted on the other side of the road without knowing where they started or where they’re going.
Find the pace that works for your business
Running reminds me that there is a big difference between going as fast as you possibly can and finding a pace you can actually sustain. You can sprint for a kilometre, but if you spend the next five kilometres exhausted and unable to continue, it probably wasn’t the most effective strategy.
Communications can work in exactly the same way. You can launch an ambitious content plan, promise daily social media, pitch every journalist you can think of and try to be everywhere at once. But if you can’t maintain it, what happens next? The content stops, the social channels go quiet, the PR activity disappears, and eventually you find yourself having to start again. Sometimes a smaller, more focused approach is far more effective.
That might mean choosing two platforms rather than trying to manage five, focusing on a handful of meaningful media relationships rather than chasing every piece of coverage, or creating content that genuinely supports your business objectives rather than simply filling the content calendar.
The best strategy isn’t necessarily the one that looks the busiest from the outside, it’s the one that works for your business and that you can realistically sustain.
Ask better questions
Perhaps, instead of asking, “Why aren’t we doing as much as them?”, the more useful questions are: What are we actually trying to achieve? Who do we need to reach? What do we want them to think, feel or do? Where are they most likely to engage with us, and what can we realistically maintain?
Perhaps the most important question of all is: Is what we’re doing actually working?
Those questions shift the focus away from comparison and back towards strategy. They also make it much easier to identify what you genuinely need to be doing, rather than simply reacting to what everyone else appears to be doing.
Progress doesn’t have to look impressive
I think this is one of the things I like most about running – progress doesn’t always look particularly impressive. Sometimes it is a faster time or a longer distance, but sometimes it is simply getting out there when you really didn’t want to.
Business can be similar. Not every communications win is going to be a huge national media feature or a viral post. Sometimes it is the right person seeing something you shared. It might be a potential client remembering your name, a journalist coming back to you because you’ve built a relationship, a partnership developing from a conversation, or simply a customer understanding your business a little better. Those things might not look particularly impressive from the outside, but they can be exactly what your business needs.
That’s an important distinction. Visibility isn’t about being the loudest person in the room. It’s about being visible in the right rooms, to the right people, for the right reasons.
Run your own race
There will always be another business doing more: More content. More followers. More media coverage. More events, and that’s fine, let them!
The aim isn’t to keep up with everyone else. It’s to understand where you’re trying to go and build a communications strategy that gets you there. Find your pace. Know when to push. Know when to adjust, and, perhaps most importantly, stop assuming that because someone else looks like they’re miles ahead, you’re somehow doing something wrong. Your business has its own race to run – and your communications strategy should be built around that.
If you’d like to have a conversation about your communications strategy – or exchange running tips – please drop me a line: sam@footstepcommunications.com
