Good Marketing Practices Wear Out

Is this you... ?

When you watch TV, you can't wait for the ads. On YouTube, you let every ad play fully. You open your email inbox eagerly every morning, anticipating all the emails with this week's sales or next week's webinars. You read the newspaper for those big black and white ads. You check out every promotional link that Google places in your search results. You go for the ads first when you log into Facebook. You're entranced by the billboards on the Bedford Highway.

So, is this you? No? It's not anybody.

There is no one eagerly anticipating your sales pitches. (Your mother doesn't count.)

We keep on doing these things, even without an eager audience, because they work sometimes. That perfect timing, or perfect graphic, or perfect wording, sometimes gets people's attention. So we keep doing what works sometimes.

Eventually, though, what worked sometimes starts to work even less frequently. As more and more marketers adopt the same strategies, it's harder to get people's attention. I can attest that tactics that rocked people's inboxes 5 years ago don't work as well now.

The only magic formula that works for marketing is continuous improvement -  gradual never-ending change. This is about getting better all the time. It's as important to your marketing efforts as it is to every other aspect of your business.

Constant improvement in marketing is hard work! It's watching what others are doing, brainstorming and developing new ideas, implementing efficient processes, working with experts, paying attention to feedback and statistics, and implementing new tactics.

Complacency is the enemy of successful marketing. When things work (even just sometimes), we can get lulled into thinking (and hoping) that they'll continue to work. How can you fight complacency? One suggestion is to add a regular monthly marketing review into your calendar. Actively do those things I've mentioned above.

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