Yesterday we went to see the visiting circus in a nearby town. I must admit, I’m a sucker for circus, not just because of the glamour, performers pushing themselves towards perfection, the smells of sawdust and animals intermingled with that of animals small and large. It’s also a question of circus being one of the last places in modern society which actually focuses on grace. I always catch myself becoming moist in the corner of my eyes while watching these graceful performers, for a moment forgetting all the hard work that came before this exact moment of excellence.

There is in fact a pertinent marketing lesson to be had here – not the least if you’re trying to break into the internet marketing arena. Never, ever forget, that behind the shining examples (who more often than not are trying to sell you an image of internet marketing being something far removed from ‘work’) are tons of hard work.

Now, I won’t go as far as to say that there’s a lot of grace in the world of internet marketing – I think that’ll have to be left for the circus-world to carry on into the future. But it is safe to say, that if you treat your online endeavours as a serious business, you stand a better than average chance of becoming a success.

But it does need a lot of hard work, and something else that circus can teach us a lot about. You see, one of the other things about circus that has always fascinated me immensely is what goes on behind the scenes. The task of securing that the infrastructure is in place, that all the stuff is at hand at exactly the right time when the performers need them, the incredible setting up and pulling down of the big tents in no time short – there’s no glamour or fame in that, but it’s equally as important in securing that the audience has a great time.

Remember that, the next time you launch a new product etc. – make sure that all the stuff behind the scenes are taken care of. There’s nothing worse for a customer than for instance, having something go wrong with the payment, then going to the support site (if that’s at all advertised) and being unable to log a support ticket, because someone forgot to update the system with some new information. And it goes in your business exactly the same as in the circus-business – if your customer has a bad experience, chances that they’ll return are quite low.

Tags: business building, business mindset, internet marketing, internet marketing musings

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 19th, 2009 at 5:50 PM and is filed under Musings on Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.