How often have you been driving, and, frustrated with the ridiculously roundabout way Google planned out your trip, started looking for shortcuts?

After some quick thinking, you jerk the wheel, pull down a side street and take what you know to be a more direct route, sure that this will cut half an hour off your commute.

Human: 1
Machine: 0

It doesn’t take long for you to realize that you’re chosen route takes you through a residential area, with a stop sign on every other street. Frustrated with the lack of traffic flow you turn off again to find another, slightly less direct route.

You turn down the next, bigger avenue and are cruising along for a few blocks until you hit a school zone which has traffic backed up for a few blocks.

Starting to get more agitated, and unwilling to crawl along at this pace, you again pull off, opting for an even less direct route, this one, at least, on a main artery.

You pull onto your new route and relax as you join the flow of traffic. Things are looking good, you’re not making quite as good time as you originally anticipated when you turned off of Google’s original route, but you’re still slightly ahead of schedule.

You can’t help but smirk at all those suckers who can’t think for themselves and just take whatever Google spoon-feeds them.

Red taillights snap you out of your reverie as you slam on your brakes and narrowly stop short of plowing into the car in front of you.

Traffic slows to a stall around you and as you crane your neck, you can see the flashing orange of road a construction crew ahead in the distance.

Furiously, you swipe open your phone and look at the map. Red lines of standstill traffic for miles.

Again you punch in your destination to assess your options.

As if mocking you, Google directs you to backtrack and join up with its originally suggested, roundabout route.

Reluctant to admit defeat, but without a better option, you switch on your signal and join the line of cars waiting to turn off ahead of the construction.

As you merge back on to your original route, you check the clock and realize that you’re now 25 minutes behind where you would have been if you had just stuck to the original route.

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When it comes to our work and businesses, we’re presented with a near-unending stream of products, services, and strategies that purport to shortcut the process of increasing our visibility, growing our audience and making more sales.

Whether it’s buying Instagram followers, automating our lead gen processes, finding a way to game Google’s latest search update, running a viral contest or any number of other hacks, these “shortcuts” get us thinking that it’s possible to quickly leap from where we are now, to where we want to be a year (or five) from now.

Each new tactic’s landing page has raving testimonials of how this product or strategy transformed their business, and life overnight.

More fans, more money, more impact. We’re sure we can be the next success story and have it all just by implementing this new tool in our marketing efforts, shortcutting our way to the top and bypassing our competition in the process.

The thing is, much like with driving, the routes that look like shortcuts rarely are.

We dabble and try a dozen different tools each promising to transform our business overnight, but when the results don’t come as advertised, we start looking for the next quick fix, the next shortcut.

As we fall further and further behind our intended schedule, we search ever more desperately for ever-shorter shortcuts., all the while, neglecting what we’re still sure is the long way around, confident that we can still make up for our wasted time if we can just get one of these shortcuts to work.

We need to remember, however, that real marketing is about nothing more than building an authentic relationship with our audience, and there’s no shortcut to relationship-building.

What appears initially to be the long way around isn’t sexy, and it’s not easy.

It requires us to commit to showing up consistently for our audience with empathy, and curiosity.

It requires us to give generously of our time, our knowledge, and our resources to the benefit of the tribe.

It requires us to commit to the long game, to understand that the route to achieving our goals isn’t about speed or audience size, but about building the deepest connection possible with those who choose to engage with us.

There’s a place for the tools, the tactics, the strategies, but they’re no replacements for putting in the emotional labour of interacting, communicating, and building a connection with the other humans we’re seeking to serve.

That part is mandatory, and it’s the place we need to start.

If we can do this, and do it consistently we realize sooner or later that the long way around only looks like the long way around, until it’s not.

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