Great marketing habits are much more important than any particular marketing technique or activity.
Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits have been subtracted from your good ones.
-Benjamin Franklin
We can debate all day about the best exercise program, but we all know that spending four hours at the gym one day a month will not make up for a twenty-nine days of missed or sketchy workouts, no matter what how much we pay for a personal trainer or use specialized machines.
Getting and staying healthy depends more on frequency and diligence than on an particular activity.
And yet for some reason, when it comes to sales and marketing, we think we can ignore sales and marketing tasks and stay busy with the customers we have, until suddenly we lose a big client, or get toward the end of the year, realize we are not as close to our goals as we’d like.
We start buying ads, going to trade shows, and “dialing for dollars,” driving our few prospects crazy with our persistence.
It doesn’t work that way.
With an exercise program, you’re more likely to get injured or sore by “overdoing it” if you fail to build good habits.
With a marketing program, you’re more likely to damage your cash flow or your company’s reputation if you fail to build good habits.
So, we advise clients to develop a routine that works for them. The fact that you have a routine is more important that performing any particular activity on any particular day, of course, so adjust to what works for you. But here’s a model program we advocate:
(For the record, you’re wasting your time in any social media channel unless a good number of your most desired customers, most feared competitors, and most important partners
are using. Our rule of thumb is to check your Top Ten list – if most of them are present and active on a social media channel, it’s worth spending the time. If not, check again in six months to a year, but for now you should spend your time connecting with those potential customers in other ways. )
There is no “magic” that can take the place of consistent, intelligent, honest work.
But we’ve found that having a great routine takes a lot of the difficulty and indecision out of the process. You can be a slave to your habits, or you can make your habits work for you!
Need some help setting up a measurable, performance-based marketing program, or setting up a great routine for your team to follow?
Find 30 minutes on our schedule and let’s talk.
Mention this article and we’ll send you a copy of our book – 16 Secrets of Marketing for the Aviation Industry.}.