How to Defeat Strategic Overwhelm in 3 Steps
Have you been feeling overwhelmed and unsure of what content marketing strategies to focus on lately?
As entrepreneurs, it's easy to get caught up in an endless stream of podcasts, books, and courses telling us all the things we "should" be doing to market our business.
The sheer volume of incoming advice can quickly reach a breaking point, leaving us frozen and unable to take action on any of it.
This state of paralysis stems from two common types of "strategic overwhelm":
When something doesn't come naturally, it's tempting to endlessly study it in hopes of someday feeling "ready" to take action. But this can lead to analysis paralysis. For example, entrepreneurs who don't inherently enjoy or relate to essential marketing activities like email, sales funnels, and positioning, these disciplines often feel intimidating or frustrating.
On the other hand, action-focused entrepreneurs encounter a different issue. Too many options resulting in lack of clarity about where to focus first. In the same example, an insatiable curiosity about marketing strategy can unintentionally lead us down rabbit holes of exploring tactics before we've clearly defined our goals. Eventually information overload sets in.
The antidote lies in "shelving the shoulds" - giving ourselves permission to deliberately focus our marketing efforts on just one or two areas, while letting other tactics marinate for later.
This requires viewing our strategy as a metaphorical "cupboard" with "drawers" that represent all the different marketing platforms and activities.
By visualizing how the pieces fit together, we can more intentionally choose the drawers we want to open and sequence the right activities without the constant pressure to do it all.
Here are 3 tips for managing strategic overwhelm by shelving the shoulds:
View your overall marketing strategy as a “cupboard” with component “drawers” you can open/close as needed over time.
Recognize you need an overarching strategy, but don't try to master everything at once. Start with your strengths.
Commit to focusing on just one single marketing strategy for the next 3-6 months before reevaluating. Document it somewhere visible to refer back to.
While maintaining awareness of other options, consciously shelving them reduces noise and clutter so creativity and consistency can emerge.
Just as marinating meat enhances flavor, letting unused ideas sit often improves them with time and clarity.
Of course, we still need an overarching plan to guide our choices of which drawers to open first.
Setting SMART business goals, then reverse engineering the necessary marketing tactics is ideal, but even loosely themed direction works.
For example: "This quarter, I will focus only on attracting my ideal client through content and email" still constitutes a strategy.
What doesn't cut it? Mistaking individual tactics like Instagram or guest podcast interviews as strategies in their own right.
While certainly useful activities, they only form pieces of the puzzle. For best results, always link tactics to a larger strategy centered on your goals and ideal client.
Document it someplace visible as your official "marketing cupboard" so you can refer back when those pesky shoulds come knocking.
By consciously "shelving" certain tactics for now through an overarching strategy, we free ourselves from overwhelm paralysis to take aligned action.
