The Planning Fallacy and Marketing

My daughter Violet is in an extremely cute stage where she insists on doing everything herself. When I try to put her jacket on, I am told, “I do it.” When I attempt to pour milk into her cereal bowl, then again, “I do it.” It doesn’t matter if she can in fact do what I’m trying to do for her. Her response is always the same – “No daddy, I do it!” :)

It’s cute for a 2-year old because she doesn’t correctly pronounce the “I’ll” and it’s obviously healthy for her to have a “can-do” attitude with everything. How else is she going to learn how to do the simple, everyday tasks like dressing herself unless she keeps practicing?

It works for a 2-year old, but that same “I-can-do-everything” attitude can be devastating for adults. Especially adults running the marketing for their businesses.

You Can Not Do Everything

Repeat after me, “I can not do everything myself.” That’s the reality of life despite what we try to tell ourselves. In fact, our own brains actually lie to us so we truly believe we can do everything, and we believe that 8-hour tasks can be done in just a few short minutes. (This is known as the planning fallacy.)

This leads to unrealistic goals, unattainable deadlines and never-ending task lists. Does that sound familiar? It doesn’t matter if you’re the business owner, the VP of marketing, or the marketing intern, we all suffer from this internal struggle with our time.

In regards to digital marketing, this translates to poor performance across all marketing channels because there’s not enough focus, time and energy devoted to any given tactic. It’s the classic case of spreading yourself too thin.

So what’s the solution?

The Faster & Cheaper Solution

At best, we’re all experts at a few things and we’re just OK at other tasks. If you ever catch yourself saying, “I know enough to be dangerous” then that’s a perfect example of a task you should not be doing yourself.

For example, I know enough HTML, CSS, PHP and even Photoshop to be dangerous. With a gun against my head, I could code up a website from scratch.

But that doesn’t mean I should ever spend my time writing code. I’m OK, but I’m nowhere near an expert. I’d estimate it takes me at least double the amount of time to complete a coding task when compared to an expert, but probably a lot more since I suffer from the planning fallacy. :)

So right there we know that it’s faster for me to hire an expert. That’s obvious. What’s not so obvious is that’s it’s much cheaper as well. Let’s look at a simplified example where an expert costs twice as much as myself or an employee who is “good enough to be dangerous.”

If the expert completes the task in half the time, then you who cares right? You just broke even…

But that does not factor in the opportunity costs. If you hire an expert, then you or your employee are free to work on another project! So not only do you get that one task complete at the same cost, or often for less, you’ll also complete another task at the same time.

That means outsourcing to an expert is not only faster and cheaper, but it also allows you to be more productive! Or to put this another way, if you try to do everything yourself, then you’ll severely limit the growth of your business.

Where Do You Need Help?

Are there any marketing projects that you just can’t find time to work on? Did you plan to improve your SEO, online advertising, and/or email marketing in 2014, but instead just moved the deadline to next year?

If you answered yes, then we should talk. I’m setting aside time to provide 1-on-1 planning sessions to help you achieve your sales and marketing goals in 2015. To claim your planning session, click here to fill out this brief application and we’ll be in touch.