It’s that time of year again.
If you’re like most people, this is the season when you make your New Year’s resolutions. After all, a new year is the perfect time for positive changes and self-improvement.
Can you guess what the #1 New Year’s resolution is for 2014?
If you said “lose weight” or “go on a diet”, you hit the nail on the head. In fact, that’s probably the most popular resolution every January.
But you know what else?
Most people aren’t successful in achieving their resolution.
You know how it goes. You make a decision to go on a diet. At first everything is going fine. Maybe by February or March you’re still on your diet. But then you the realities of everyday life suck you in and cripple your resolve. Then you hear about a new, even better way to lose weight faster. “Perfect”, you think, “This will help me get back on track and still lose weight.” A month later, you switch to a new diet you’ve heard about that will really help you shed those extra pounds.
This continues and next thing you know it’s December again and you weigh more than you did last January when you started your diet! Sound familiar? Yale University professor and obesity expert Kelly D. Brownell calls this vicious cycle “yo-yo dieting” or “the yo-yo effect.” It’s easy to get caught up because most people are successful in the beginning but eventually discover that maintaining their weight loss long-term is tough. Then they try even harder to lose the weight they regained, and the cycle begins again.
Well, guess what? The problem isn’t specific to losing weight. In fact, many marketers suffer from a similar problem.
Which brings me to…
The Ugly Truth About “Yo-Yo Marketing”
Know this: The same “yo-yo effect” that plagues dieters can wreck havoc on your marketing efforts.
How do you know if you’re a yo-yo marketer?
If you frequently change your marketing tactics on a whim
or you’re doing something just because everyone else is
and you aren’t happy with your marketing results
…you might be yo-yo marketing.
When you constantly change your marketing tactics—abandoning your current course of action for the latest “flavor of the month”—it’s tough to get any traction. In fact, it’s easy to become burned out and disillusioned when it seems like nothing you try is working. Lots of folks give up because they can’t figure it out.
That’s the bad news. The good news is there’s a solution.
Why the Yo-Yo Effect Will Derail the Success Of Your Marketing
There’s a reason people get caught up in yo-yo marketing. It’s simple: they mistake activity for progress and they lose focus. When you abandon the marketing tactics you’ve already started to use whenever some “new thing” catches your attention—sometimes known as “shiny object syndrome”—it keeps you from seeing results with your marketing efforts.
The sad thing is that some of the tactics you’ve tried might have been exactly what you needed if only you would have maintained your focus long enough to see the payoff.
The best marketing tactics are built on a solid foundation of strategy. If you know what you want to achieve there’s a simple framework for finding the right mix of marketing tactics to implement your overall strategy.
Do one thing. See if it works. If it does, do more of it. If it doesn’t, do something else.
Rinse and repeat.
6 Tips to Start Using Immediately
Keeping that framework in mind, the first thing you want to do is concentrate your efforts. You may have heard the acronym FOCUS: Follow One Course Until Successful. Well, that’s the fastest way to get results from your marketing “self-improvement” this year. Find out which marketing tactics work for your business by systematically experimenting with different tactics one by one.
Here are a few tips to get you started:
Be selective
Make sure that any marketing tactic you consider is closely tied to your overall strategy. This is an easy way to weed out many of the tactics that you’ll see that might tempt you to switch gears. Ask yourself how using a particular strategy will help you achieve your business goals.
Be realistic
In a lot of cases where people decided that a certain tactic wasn’t working the real problem was unrealistic expectations. If you thing one action you take is going to “make something go viral” you’ll discount any successes you do have because they don’t measure up to your high expectations.
Be patient
Nothing worthwhile happens overnight. Not losing weight and not success in marketing. But you have to make a commitment to give the tactics you use time to work. And you won’t know if they’re working or not unless you can measure the success of your marketing. Which brings us to the next point.
Be vigilant
You know how people who are trying to lose weight keep track of everything? What they ate, when they ate it, how many calories were in it…you get the picture. Well, you need to do the same thing with your marketing. Collect data and test everything. Don’t roll out a big, expensive marketing campaign until you’ve collected lots of data by launching smaller, lower-risk campaigns to see works and what doesn’t.
Think long-term
Make small consistent changes to your marketing tactics instead of trying to do everything at once. Just as dieters who try to lose 30 pounds in 2 weeks are not likely to be successful in the long run (not to mention putting themselves at risk of injury), marketers who want to go from no customers to 1,000,000 customers overnight are setting themselves up for failure.
Be supported
If you’re not lucky enough to have a mentor to show you the ropes you should strongly consider getting training or coaching to catapult your marketing success. It’s just like when people join dieting communities to share success stories, find motivation, and learn what works and what doesn’t.
As I mentioned before, try different strategies individually to see which marketing tactics work for your business. The ones that work will become part of your marketing mix. The ones that don’t work, you’ll stop using. This is an easy process to use to avoid the yo-yo effect.
Now that you’re finished reading I want you to do two things:
Be sure to leave a comment on this blog post letting me know if you plan to implement this in your business.
Do you have a friend that always falls for the “yo-yo marketing” trap? Share this post with them.
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