Which type of marketing plan is easiest to stay committed to?

Marketing plans are all well and good but they can also be a lot like an expensive camera. How so? Allow us to explain.

This occurred to me on a recent vacation. My wife and I brought a small “point and shoot” camera because we don’t know the first thing about taking good photos. Our friend on the other hand is a semi-professional photographer and brought along his expensive DSLR with several lenses. This camera was the size of a bazooka and required its own shoulder bag. Over the course of that vacation, it was my wife and I who ended up taking all of the most memorable photos of everyone. How could that be? Because the best camera is the one that’s with you, and our friend got tired of lugging his around!

Let’s apply this back to your marketing plan: the best plan is the one that you actually act on! If there are so many bells and whistles that it becomes burdensome, you won’t be able to keep up with it. In the end, you’ll actually accomplish a lot less than someone with more modest goals who simply manages to stay consistent.

So it is in this spirit that we want to encourage you to stick with it! Your marketing after all is the key to consistent and recurring revenue for your business. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, and here are some tips that can help.

Here are our top 5 tips for staying committed to your marketing plan:

1. Don’t bite off more than you can chew! Time and time again we see business owners draft up multi-channel assaults on their target audience that require YouTube videos, an Instagram expert, QR codes, landing pages, and hundreds of door hangers. It’s great to be excited, but you’re going to burn yourself out! Build up to that fully implemented marketing plan by picking one new project to focus on at a time.
2. Write your goals down. We believe in the power of positive affirmations, or the idea that if you say something often enough and have it posted on your wall, eventually it will seep into your subconscious and you’ll get it done. Now, whether that works because of those written notes, or whether the type of person who’s dedicated enough to write their goals down was bound to get it done anyways, does it really matter? Prove that you’re a doer and not a talker and keep your SMART goals written down and visible in your office!
3. Run regular tests and get feedback. With marketing projects, it’s ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ Make sure that you stay on top of them and their ongoing success by running A/B tests to make sure that they’re functioning properly. In doing so, you’ll notice and fix small things that might have been out of order and hurting your campaign, like typos, broken links, and unsent emails. It gives you a positive way to tinker and keeps you consistently engaged in your marketing programs.
4. Calendar everything twice. We’re going to admit here that we set two alarms every morning: the one that we’re bound to ‘snooze’ and the one that actually gets us up. You should do the same for all of your campaign launches, completions, check-ups, and reminders, so that if you’re busy or don’t have time set aside that day, you do eventually follow-up with them.
5. Automate everything you can. This is probably the most important rule, and we saved the best for last. If you have the opportunity to create, say, a postcard campaign, and it takes you fifteen minutes, would you rather it go out once or three times? Of course you want to run multiple times on its own! Digital marketing makes it easy for you to rely on partners to send out your campaigns on time. Take it even further and set your campaigns to trigger themselves and go out automatically when new people move into a neighborhood, when a client needs an appointment reminder, or when the first day of spring arrives. It’s impossible not to stay committed to your marketing when you’ve made it someone else’s job!

And there you have it, our top five tips that have helped us stay consistent in our own marketing! Consistency is a big part of how we’ve turned ProspectPLUS! into one of the top direct mail marketing vendors in the industry. When the company was founded our goals may have resembled a hefty DSLR camera but we tackled each project one at a time with a trusty portable point and shoot camera and the results followed!

So get out there and get that first marketing success under your belt! ProspectPLUS! can help you automate your direct mail campaigns or give us a call today at 877-222-6010 and we’ll see if we can help you with whatever you’re working on!