Marketing Lessons Learned from Hiking & Backpacking

Training for my upcoming backpacking trip has been challenging. But I’m learning great lessons, several of which are applicable to marketing. In today’s video, I share four lessons I’ve learned that can make marketing your business easier and more effective. Take a look.

Full transcript below.

Full transcript:

Today I want to share a few lessons that I’m learning as my wife and I train for a backpacking trip in Colorado. And these are lessons that are very applicable to marketing and can help all of us do a better job. Hi, my name is Steve Phipps and this is the weekly marketing tip from Wayfind Marketing.

So my wife and I are training for this backpacking trip and there’s a lot of physical training. We’re working out five to six days a week. It’s cardio, there’s strength, there’s getting out on the trail with a backpack. And as we have been training, certain lessons have been bubbling to the surface that I think are very applicable.

And so the first thing is you’ve got to have the right equipment. You have to have the right gear and so this backpack here, this is a pack. If you’ve ever used a backpack like this before, there’s all kinds of straps, there’s all kinds of different things, but these need to be fitted to you. They come in different sizes, they sit differently, and this pack doesn’t fit me. And after getting out on the trails and actually after going to Outdoors Inc. and trying a couple of different things we realized this is not the right fit for me. And what ended up happening is my shoulders would just be really sore and once we got to about 35 pounds in the pack it was just, it was rough, I felt miserable because I’d be out on the trail for several hours. So one lesson is make sure you’ve got the right gear. Now what I mean by that is think about the tactics for your business. The tactics that work for you may not be the tactics that somebody else is using. Part of it is your industry, your business, your personality. There are different things that influence that. And the second part of that is talk to somebody that’s experienced. When I went to Outdoors Inc. and they helped me try it on and adjust it a bunch of different ways, we realized pretty quickly okay, this is not the right pack for me and so now I’ve got a different pack that is sized properly and it makes all the difference in the world. So make sure you’ve got the right gear. Talk to a coach, talk to somebody that can help you make sure that you’re getting fitted.

Now the next lesson is make sure that you have a clear goal in mind. Know where you’re going, have a map. In fact on my phone an app that we have that we use and it’s probably not going to show up very well now but it’s called All Trails. And so it maps out, tells us what the elevation is, it tells us what the distance of the trail is, and it will record us as we go and it gives me alerts to let me know if I’m getting off the trail, if I take the wrong way. So have a map, have a plan, have some sense of where you’re trying to go, how far you’re trying to go. All of those things matter. So have goals. Even a basic plan so that you know how you’re supposed to, how you’re tracking.

Now another thing, don’t go it alone. The training that we’re doing is hard. This last weekend we were out on the trail over five miles carrying 40 pounds in our backpacks, getting 1,500, no, 1,700 feet in elevation gain. That’s exhausting, it’s 90% humidity. But I wasn’t out there by myself. And so when maybe I was struggling, my wife was there to encourage and help and vice versa. And so with your marketing, get somebody to give you some accountability. You don’t have to go it alone. Find another business owner. Help each other, encourage each other, hold each other accountable. It makes all the difference in the world.

So those are three things for you. Make sure you get the right equipment. Actually, yes, four. Right equipment, talk to somebody that can help you, make sure you’ve got a goal and a plan, and don’t go it alone, get some accountability. Hope you find these helpful and grow your business.