The (other) key to successful marketing habits
--> one that's within your control
Last time I said that the key to establishing successful habits - especially marketing ones - is to find an activity you enjoy doing.
Because if you hate what you’re doing you won’t keep it up for long. If you enjoy it you’ll keep at it.
But what about the big swathe of stuff you might not hate, but you don’t love doing either? Stuff that needs to get done but often gets put aside.
The reality is that for me, there’s very little marketing I truly love doing.
I usually quite enjoy writing, for example. But sometimes I don’t.
I don’t hate it. But often it’s more meh.
Something that’s OK - but there are plenty of other things I’d rather be doing.
Perhaps you’re like me and there are many marketingy things you don’t mind doing and you know you should be doing - but you can always find some excuse not to, or some more interesting thing to focus on.
If that’s the case you need to find a way to motivate yourself to keep focused on those important-but-not-exciting marketing tasks.
There are the usual habit hacks of course: start small, pick a regular time and context etc.
But what works best for me is feedback. Knowing I’m making progress and beginning to get results.
Because whats the point if it’s not leading to results?
The problem with a lot of marketing is it’s very much “do this and you’ll eventually get results - but you won’t see anyything for ages”.
The whole “so and so had a flatlining podcast for 5 years before their numbers skyrocketed” thing you hear so often.
That doesn’t work for me.
I always think “yeah yeah, but what about the 100 folks who had a flatlining podcast for 5 years and it continued to flatline? You can’t just quote the outliers as a reason to keep going”.
I need to see proper signs of progress.
I always remember when I started going to networking groups a decade or so ago and the mantra from the people who ran them was always that it would take a long time to see results. Our networking was laying the foundation for later success.
Funnily enough that success always seemed to come after your next subscription renewal.
Now maybe they were right and results would take off. But it was too uncertain for me.
And I think that lack of certainty is what makes most people give up. Not all of us can listen to a guru tell us we need to stick and something for years without seeing results before things will turn up and actually do it.
Most of us need to see some evidence of progress.
When Kathy and I lost a bunch of weight a couple of years ago what worked really well for us was to be tough enough on ourselves early on that we saw visible progress - at least a few pounds lost every week. Seeing that progress gave us confidence that our plan was going to work so we kept going.
Even though a less strict diet and exercise programme might have been better in theory, we’d have given up if we hadn’t seen progress every week (or in fact every few days) early on.
It’s the same with marketing. And there are two things you need to look at:
You need to pick approaches to marketing where you can see signs of progress early on to keep you going. Even if that’s just “vanity metrics” like clicks on ads, visits to web pages, email signups or likes and replies on your content. Almost no one can keep plugging away for months in the absence of any signs that things are happening.
You need to find way to bring forward real results. If all you have to sell is giant consulting projects or big high ticket coaching then it’s going to take a lot of warming up for people to be ready to buy. And that means a long time before you’ll see real results form your marketing. Find a way of making it easy for clients to get started with you that’s less of a commitment and so can happen earlier. That way you’ll know if your marketing is working much, much earlier and you won’t be tempted to give up on it too soon.
I’ll share some ideas on the latter in my next email.
Until then - take a look at the marketing you’re doing - or planning to do - and ask yourself how you can know early whether it’s working.
- Ian