This week has been a busy one with lots of frustrated folks coming to me for marketing strategy consulting calls. I let people vent for about 10 minutes (it’s part of the process, I’m finding), and then we get down to the business of my marketing consulting:

  • What’s working?
  • What used to work?
  • What’s not working anymore?
  • What are they trying to be or grow into?
  • How can we create better strategies or leverage existing ones to make it all happen faster, more effectively and for more MONEY?

So, here’s an interesting thing . . . invariably, my frustrated person will volunteer that he or she used to do this type of activity (a certain mailing, a joint venture alliance, a Sister City strategy, a free teleseminar, a stair-step buy strategy) and it produced fairly sizable results.

But they stopped doing it.

My next question, “If it was working, why’d you stop?’ **** long pause ensues **** And then, the conclusive answer, “I don’t really know.”

We’re all guilty of doing the same. We stop because we get bored with it. We want to try a new idea. We think our audience is tired of it. We went to a seminar and they told us we were living in the Dark Ages and needed to try THIS instead. So, off we drive, full tilt, on our new idea and we leave the perfectly-working strategy in a cloud of dust. And then we wonder why our business has declined.

One of my dear mentors, Jay Abraham, used to remind me that no matter how bored I got with a strategy, if it was still hauling in prospects by bucketloads (even the size of a kid’s sand bucket), it was worth keeping in play. Remember, your niche prospect community doesn’t begin here and end there – it is, instead, a constantly moving parade past your front door. If the marketing strategy is working, there’s always going to be someone new looking for it.

So, this weekend as you’re watching your kid’s game or running errands, think back to the marketing you were doing when business was rocking. What worked? If it worked, did you stop doing it? If you stopped doing it … uhh … how about starting it again? If you think you need help adjusting it for the current market or updating it in some way, you know where to find me: Diane@ArmitageInc.com