Innovative Marketing or Proven Marketing: Which Does Your Business Need?
Should your marketing be innovative?
There’s a moment in most first conversations where an owner tells us what they want, and what they want is something new. A channel nobody in their market is using. An angle, a hook, a format. The word that comes up is innovative, and the energy behind it is real — they’ve been doing the same thing for three years and it stopped moving.
We take that seriously. We also, fairly often, come back with a recommendation that sounds disappointingly familiar.
What fundamentals win local markets?
Nothing about how a Joshua tree survives the Mojave is dramatic. Most of the work happens underground, every day, whether it rains or not. Build deep before wide.
In marketing terms the deep roots are things like: a Google Business Profile that’s actually claimed, complete, and updated, with photos from this year. A real page for each service and each location, written for a person rather than assembled for a crawler. A consistent habit of asking satisfied patients and clients for reviews, at the moment they’re happiest, without it depending on one front-desk person remembering. A CRM that knows who’s already called. Follow-up that fires on its own.
Nobody has ever been excited about that list. We’ve also rarely seen a local business get beaten by a competitor who does all of it well.
When is the unconventional route right?
The reframe we’d offer is this: innovation isn’t a category of tactic, it’s a judgment about fit. The proven thing, executed at a level of care your market isn’t matching, is an innovation in that market. Going against the flow entirely is sometimes right too — when the obvious channel is genuinely saturated, when a business has something so unusual about it that conventional positioning wastes it, when the standard playbook has already been run properly and stalled. Those are real situations, and in them the unconventional route is the right call.
The distinction is whether the new idea is in service of the goal or in service of itself. Novelty is easy to sell and pleasant to present. It’s also the most common way an owner ends up eighteen months and a lot of money from where they started, with a very interesting body of work and the same number of consultations.
So the honest answer to “what’s the most innovative thing you’d do for us” is that we don’t know yet, and anyone who does know before looking at your market, your intake, and your last two years of data is guessing in a confident voice.
What we can promise is the reasoning. We’ll show you why we’re recommending the boring thing or the bold one, what we expect it to do, and how quickly we’ll know if we’re wrong. That’s the part worth paying for. The tactics are downstream of it.
