One of the greatest challenges to effectively marketing a business is determining which marketing method is best suited for your business.

Most people look at what their competitors are doing to market their businesses and then simply imitate that, whether good or bad.

The best marketing strategy does not involve selecting only one or two marketing approaches that we see others using.

The best marketing approach resembles an octopus.

An octopus is very effective at catching food with eight limbs. If the octopus loses one limb it may momentarily lose some of its strength and agility, but it adapts and continues on as an effective hunter and predator.

It's the same with marketing your business. The more marketing approaches you use simultaneously the more successful you can become and the easier it is to continue growing your company.

You will continue to thrive despite the challenges that your competitors may face. No setback in any one marketing approach will ever devastate you or pose major problems.

Despite the many options available most companies use no more than two or three marketing methods at best to grow their company.

Few realize that there are over 100 methods for bringing in new business, for increasing web traffic, for selling more to existing clients, and for increasing repeat sales that their competitors are not using.

They basically imitate worms in their marketing attempts. A worm's approach to life is singular. It does not use multiple limbs because it has none. Its existence is slow and labor-intensive. Very unlike an octopus.

The great thing about this is that most competitors are making this same mistake. They may be too busy, too shorthanded, or too myopic to do much more than hand out boxes of business cards and sit around talking ‘fish stories' of the one that got away.

That is a marketing approach to avoid.

Don't just settle for an ad in the yellow pages, your local newspaper, or on the radio.

Use as many marketing methods as make sense for your industry, your market, and your company. Then you will become a marketing octopus while your competitors remain marketing worms.