Constant and consistent. It’s good advice, isn’t it? Good marketing will (almost!) always fail if you aren’t consistent with it.
I know many of you are ‘creatives’; it’s a common entrepreneurial trait. But being creative also has its challenges. You get bored easily. You enjoy starting stuff, but completing it … well, that’s an entirely different matter! So ensuring you are being consistent with your marketing is important because we all know how long it can take for many of our prospective clients to come forward and say yes to us. Yes?
If you keep chasing new ideas, you don’t follow up on leads and potential business and you miss out on sales. However, there comes a time that you may need to change the rhythm. And that’s exactly what I have decided to do with my weekly Skidmore Spark.
For the past 15 years of writing and sending out my weekly email, I have stuck to sending it out on a Thursday. There was some science behind that decision – my email statistics told me that my open rates were at their highest on a Thursday – as well as some feeling behind the decision – deciding that Wednesday was a good day to be writing my content. But, as you may be experiencing yourself, email open rates and click-throughs have been erratic, to say the least over the past year or so. Plus I was finding that I was skipping some weeks because I got too busy to write.
Too busy to write??
No, that’s no good!
That’s when I knew that my consistent Thursday rule was not getting the best from me. So I am changing my rhythm; writing the week before and scheduling this email to arrive in your inbox for Monday morning. Will it work better for me? Who knows … but I am willing to give it a try.
And this is why I wanted to share this with you today. Because I don’t think we do enough change. I’m not talking about jumping from one thing to the next. That’s not change; that’s just shiny shiny mentality, trying to find the one tactic that’s going to work because you haven’t got a strategy. The change I’m talking about here is the change to our consistency; a change brought on by the consistent thinking of what’s working, what’s not and how do we adapt to our fast-paced society and economy.
It’s easy to be always looking outside our business for answers. To be asking Google or your Facebook hive mind. But how often do you look within? How often do you review, reflect and adjust your rhythm based on what’s going on inside your business? Last week in our Momentum group we had our regular 4 Week Review & Redo. It’s everyone’s opportunity to assess their progress in their 90 Day Plan and have the opportunity to re-set their compass and change their sails, if need be.
There’s a simple three-part process:
- What do I need to stop doing?
- What do I need to start doing?
- What do I need to keep doing?
It’s a great little exercise to help you feel grounded and make sure you aren’t staying busy, running the hamster wheel. And it was from doing that exercise that I decided it was time to change the rhythm of my weekly newsletter. I realised I needed to break my Thursday send out rule because it didn’t seem to be working for me any more.
Try it out yourself. What are you consistently doing in your business? And is time for a change? I’d love to know what shows up for you.
Until next time, do less, be more, play bigger.
