What do diets and marketing have in common?
Diets and marketing are two topics that I never thought I’d be writing about in the same article. Read on to find out why I have paired them up.
Have you ever felt like you wanted to lose some weight and jumped on the bandwagon of some new diet you’d heard about? You stick with it for a little while and then you realise that following a diet is tough and either stop altogether until you need to lose weight again or you jump onto the next new diet you’ve heard about thinking – this is the one that will work! But actually find that you end up needing to lose more weight than you did when you started? And so the cycle of Yo Yo dieting continues.
Well this Yo Yo effect is not exclusive to dieting – I see it happening all the time in marketing too.
Are you doing Yo Yo marketing?
Do you panic when sales are low and throw yourself into marketing activity, any marketing activity?
Do you stop marketing when you bag that big new client or get a flurry of sales and then when that peters out realise that your pipeline is empty and you get marketing again?
Do you frequently start some marketing activity then stop if you aren’t getting the result you wanted immediately?
Are you chopping and changing your tactics willy nilly?
Do you suffer from ‘shiny object syndrome’? ie see others doing something new and jump on it?
If you answered yes to any or all of the above, you may be suffering from Yo Yo marketing.
source: pinterest
You may be saying, “what’s the problem with that? at least I’m doing some marketing” in a way yes, something is better than nothing but to achieve solid results, marketing is a long game, just like healthy dieting. If you constantly chop and change your marketing/diet activity (you can really use these words interchangeably) it is hard to get momentum and so your sales results instead of having a steady incline is up and down like that Yo Yo that you played with when you were a child (I had Sprite, Fanta and Coke branded ones). You start to think that nothing is working and so give up altogether just when your results may have been about to go BOOM!
So how to avoid Yo Yo Marketing?
Develop a marketing strategy with solid marketing tactics and then stick to it. If you stick to your plan you will find it easier to keep sight of your goals and know why and how you are doing what you are doing.
This isn’t to say that you can’t try something new if an opportunity comes along or be flexible with the plan if something isn’t working, but I suggest that you keep doing your planned activity and test out the new activity rather than dropping everything for something new and untested.
My potion for success is to write a marketing strategy or if you already have one, dust it off and see if it is still relevant.
· Look at what you are doing and what is or isn’t working
· Be clear on what your marketing goals are
· Try and understand your target customers
· How best to communicate with them
· Plan out a timetable of tactics to help keep you on track.
· Then, analyse how your activity performs so that you can learn what works and what doesn’t.
Here, at The Marketing Genie, I can help you devise your Marketing Strategy or dust of that old one and give it a refresh and then help you implement it. Drop me a line to see how I can help free you of the Yo Yo marketing trap and grow your business through effective and consistent marketing.
