a.k.a. How to Finally Start Marketing

Note: Eighteen months was how long Sigil had “Coming Soon!” emblazoned on its blog page. Mull over this article as a case of “do as I say, not as I do,” or imagine that the cobbler’s shoes are always in need of repair.

As professional communicators, we like to encourage businesses to iterate. Because one of the worst things a company can do, at least as far as digital communications goes, is nothing at all. Besides letting the CEO go on a racist Twitter rant or blowing the employee bonuses on huge, irrelevant ad spend, inertia is pretty bad.

So let’s talk about putting things off and the strength of progress over perfectionism.

Or, if you prefer, you can skip straight to six practical tips to overcoming your procrastination.

Procrastination Is a Nice Bubble

True procrastination isn’t about time management. So, as a business owner, all your organization apps can’t save you. It’s about your emotions (and how you aren’t dealing with them).

For starters, putting yourself out there can be scary. Business communications can feel like an extension of yourself, where dedicating hours of work in exchange for lukewarm results can feel like a slap in the face.

It’s safer to delay until you have the most perfect-est, absolutely bullet-proof, killer piece of writing–be it email newsletter, website copy, or *ahem* blog post. Avoidance is the remedy to your psychological predicament. Keep those nasty worries away. Push the dirty work to tomorrow.

Some go-to rationale for stalling:

Abundance of options. Decision paralysis like in Hick’s Law, tells us that more options are not necessarily better. The optimal number of options for decision-making is 1 to 5. Anything more and you risk being overwhelmed.
Discomfort with being finally perceived. It feels like hitting publish is a permanent statement. You’re making a declaration and putting it out into cyberspace forever. But guess what? You can edit. You can delete. You can update. The internet is fickle, and nothing is set in stone.
High standards as an excuse. It’s good to aim for quality. However, early on, you should differentiate between a standard and a roadblock.

But at its core, all this wishy-washy inaction is fueled by the fear of judgement. What you think you’re doing is protecting yourself. It feels very type A, right? You’re "just making sure" everything is exactly how it should be before launching. What you’re actually doing is being a productivity killer.

The fear that waylays publication is usually unfounded. Aside from your harshest critics, who you shouldn’t listen to anyway, no one will care that you couldn’t sort out a run-on sentence or that you used a semicolon in place of a comma. Your audience isn’t waiting with a red pen to tear you apart.

I’ll freely admit my own website sat unpublished for weeks before I let the public view it. I could blame that on a number of things that didn’t quite fall into place. I spent a million years choosing fonts, thinking about visuals and the user experience, etc. Except by worrying about making the wrong choices, I ended up making no choices at all.

Consider Sylvia Plath’s fig tree metaphor, in which she sees herself looking up at sprawling branches full of figs, trying to decide which she should eat. In the end, they all wither and drop to the ground.

"I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose.”

The Consequences of Inaction

While you sit there agonizing over the ideal choice, time marches on. The figs don’t stay ripe forever and your chance to connect with your audience slips away. Let’s be clear: the consequences of not hitting “publish” are worse than imperfection.

What happens when you don’t post?

Lost visibility. Your competitors are posting online and getting seen. Meanwhile, your business is invisible. Sales don’t get plucked out of thin air. It’s a long-term game that starts with awareness. See the much-maligned marketing funnel.
Lost momentum. The longer you wait, the harder it becomes to get started. And sporadic bursts of inspiration aren’t enough. Marketing thrives on consistency, especially when it takes 7 encounters with your brand to break through the digital noise.
Lost experience. If you never do something, how can you get better at it? The scrappy entrepreneur you admire learned by posting flawed content, instead of sitting on a draft for six months.

Progress Over Perfectionism

On the flip side, publishing your work unlocks massive benefits. People have the opportunity to resonate with your content and share it with others. And really, it’s the sharing that’s valuable. You can act as an authority all you want, but it’s hard to usurp the credibility of a peer recommendation.

Building a volume of content also helps your business establish its voice within your industry. A scrollable history displays that you’re a brand to be taken seriously, backed by expertise.

And let’s not forget the confidence you gain from hitting “post”. Eventually, what once felt daunting becomes second nature.

How to Ditch the Fear

How very neurotypical it is to just order you to quell your doubts and just run with an idea! So let’s get some actionable tips on escaping paralysis by analysis and finally start marketing your business the way it deserves.

1. Commit to a Hard Deadline

Open-ended timelines are a nightmare because they allow for endless tweaking. But surely you’ve done this step before: setting a task for next Monday in your Calendar app, knowing in your heart of hearts that you’ll breeze past it. That’s why it’s so important that you do step one in conjunction with the rest below.

2. Beware the Blank Page

Start an ugly rough draft. Stream of consciousness writing is the best way to at least get something down on a page. Put down the first things that come to mind.

Psychologically, we have an easier time correcting work than we do creating it from scratch. Take inspiration from Cunningham’s Law: “The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer.”

If you view your past work as belonging to a different version of you, you can trick yourself into transforming a lump of clay into something worth publishing.

3. Use Templates Shamelessly

Templates exist for a reason.Content calendars and pre-made Canva designs are used even in the world of professional comms. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel every time you post. Hell, the whole point of social media trends is the recycling of a premise. Just remember that ethical re-use means customizing the templates and transforming them into something that fits your brand.

4. Give Yourself Grace

You’re not going to go from zero to sixty, and you’re certainly not going to go from one post every four months to posting three times a week. At least, not on your own. Reasonable expectations will help you ramp up your business communications without the side helping of guilt.

If all you can manage as a stressed business owner is sending a bimonthly email newsletter, see that for the win that it is.

5. Get a Little Outside Help

You don’t have to fight this battle alone. Sometimes, the best way to move forward is to let someone else advise you. Sigil helps small business owners quit stalling and start executing. We’ll help you get you out of your own head and build momentum without the endless second-guessing.

6. Accept That No One Cares as Much as You Think

Finally, here is the harsh truth: most people skim, scroll, and forget. They are not analyzing your kerning. They are not zooming in to inspect whether your Instagram grid is perfectly aesthetic. Most of the time, people just want an answer to their question or a bit of entertainment on their feed.

It’s a double-edged sword. You want people to care, but the ephemeral nature of digital communications can be a freedom.

Let’s Be Imperfect

Algorithms get modified and trends shift. Platform updates open up new possibilities and shut down old ones and, ultimately, momentum beats a masterpiece. You can’t afford to wait for the best ultimate strategy because, by the time you think you’ve nailed it, the game has already changed. The only way to win is to have the courage to be half-decent.

A Procrastinator’s Guide to Digital Communications