Why Consistency Is the Key to Successful Marketing
You have probably heard the saying, "Consistency is more important than perfection." It is the secret ingredient that can turn an idea into reality.
Companies often face the challenge of growing sales and expanding their business into other markets. The solution is frequently to launch a new marketing campaign. Such a campaign could take the form of advertising on Facebook or other social media, a weekly email newsletter, monthly best-practice workshops, or sponsoring a high school soccer tournament. Whatever the final plan may be, it will need to get two elements right: consistency in your customers’ brand perception and consistency in your execution.
Consistency in Your Customers’ Brand Perception
How your customers experience your company can be vastly different. They may interact with you and your employees, or use your products or services. Some may not even be customers and only came across your ad on Facebook. But every interaction leaves a mental footprint.
Problems usually arise when your customers have a different image of your company's brand in mind than what you envisioned. For example, you want your brand to stand for kindness, but your customers experienced rudeness. You want your brand to be a synonym for quality, but your customers find the packaging cheap.
This discrepancy between how you want your company to be seen and how your customers experience your company can pose a significant risk to your plans.
No matter how many marketing dollars you spend for these two examples, you will have a hard time overcoming these perceptions. Bringing your desired brand image more in sync with reality is not just a smart business decision, but also an essential prerequisite for successful marketing. The gap does not need to be entirely closed - nobody is perfect - but aim at narrowing it as best as you can.
The next time you write a marketing plan, try to find out how your customers perceive your company and compare the results to the image you want to create with your marketing campaign. Are these two images consistent?
Consistency in Your Execution: Make Execution a Habit.
Coming up with a new marketing plan is often the easy part; executing it is much harder. Why is that? A new product, new software, or even your company is rarely marketed with a single event. These promotions can stretch over weeks and months, which can often be the cause of corporate fatigue.
To illustrate my point, let us take a simple promotional newsletter as an example. Agreeing on the idea of sending a weekly newsletter to your customers is usually the easy part. But who will come up with new material every week and then write an engaging email?
In the beginning, as everybody is likely to be excited about sending a weekly newsletter and committed to contributing to its content, the first few newsletters often go out without a hitch.
After that, with our enthusiasm probably waning, the task of finding interesting content and writing a newsletter about it could become a real burden. The reason: we rarely have only one assignment. We juggle between customer projects, workshops, and our children at home. When time is scarce, and things do not go as planned, we have to set priorities, which can result in less time being spent on our promotional newsletter.
After only a couple of months, this weekly newsletter will most likely no longer be produced. Admittedly, this is only an example. However, such a scenario happens more often than you think.
How can we avoid this unfortunate but very typical situation from occurring?
During the idea phase, be honest with yourself and your boss about taking on more work. I know that this is difficult. Nobody wants to be seen as the reason for an idea not to be realized. However, a lot of time may be wasted without your feedback only to come to the same endpoint.
Learn from past successes and failures. Do you know why previous marketing campaigns have been successful? Understanding the reasons for their successes or failures can help you choose the type of campaign your company feels most prepared to execute. For example, some organizations prefer shorter time horizons over longer ones.
Outsource the doing. Organizations may not have the necessary skillsets and in-house resources to efficiently and effectively execute a specific marketing plan. In that case, you could ask a marketing company specializing in this type of work to take over the doing. Should you pursue that option, please make sure that you do not define the scope too narrowly. A narrow scope can lead to an increase of touch points between your company and your supplier, potentially creating more work for your organization than if you had executed this marketing plan with your own resources.
Commit to the entire length of the campaign. Results do not usually show up overnight. It will take time. Some campaigns last for many months, others even years, such as hosting a YouTube channel.
Put real muscle behind the execution of your plan. The risk of underfunding the implementation of your program is real. It's like running out of gas halfway through your journey before reaching your destination.
Underfunding a campaign often falls in one of two categories: (1) the cost estimate was wrong, or (2) someone in your company knowingly did not provide the resources necessary for the program to succeed. Sometimes, it is also a little bit of both.
The first reason can be due to an honest mistake from which everyone can learn. The second reason may be a form of dishonesty.
If the company does not have the money for a particular marketing campaign, it may be better not to do it at all and save the money instead. There are probably many other options that could work better within your company's constraints and achieve the same goals.
Staying on Course
Keeping your enthusiasm alive, while doing another demonstration of your new product or recording another video for your YouTube channel, is usually the biggest challenge, especially when feedback is rare.
Don't give up, though.
Whether you start a YouTube channel, engage with followers on Facebook or Instagram, or host best-practice workshops, it can take several months for you to notice improvements.
Keep in mind that your messaging does not have to be perfect. Little flaws are human and can make your company feel authentic. Instead, it is crucial that you do not quit producing your content according to your set cadence.
Eventually, this consistency will be noticed by your clients, followers, or readers. And when this happens, you can then look back at where you started and be proud of having found the key to successful marketing.
