We live in Sonoma County which, while not always sunny, can be counted on to offer blue-skied, 70* weather at least once in any given month, and usually 3 weeks out of 4. Although official spring is still several weeks off, California spring will soon be blooming away outside.
Spring is an invigorating time of year. New plant growth, fresh flowers, baby animals and the latest round of tax returns (ok, maybe not that last one) give us an energy boost. If we made resolutions in spring instead of December, we might keep more of them.
Just like the world outside, sometimes your business and marketing can use a bit of sprucing up. What better time of year than now to inject a bit of new life into your same-old routines?
Why should you freshen up your marketing? What you’ve always done works fine! It will be time to fix things when they’re broken, and not before.
Well, first of all:
“Don’t Fix What Isn’t Broken” is Bad Marketing Philosophy
The truth is that what has always worked fine may not always work best.
Maybe it worked best once, or maybe it didn’t. But the only thing we can count on in this world is change. And if your marketing techniques haven’t changed in a decade or several, you aren’t keeping up.
I often hear professionals talking about what “millennials” want, when what they mean is “what young people want.”
As a bona fide, card-carrying millennial I can tell you that what I want is for my children to pick up their rooms and eat their vegetables. Those cutesy ad campaigns are pretty effective for my daughter’s generation, though.
If our concept of potential customers can fall that far out of date, how will our decades-old marketing practices be effective?
The Blind Spot of the Brain
Besides the passage of time and the changes it brings, there’s a good psychological reason to change up your advertising from time to time. The human brain is wired to tune out information that is repetitive so that we don’t go crazy.
You can see your nose. All the time. Did you know? Your brain tunes that out because you don’t need to see your nose. If you live near a busy highway you barely notice the traffic sounds. If you live by the ocean, breakers crash into background noise most of the time. If we always had to process every bit of input our senses came across we would lose our minds.
From a marketing perspective this means that your advertising becomes background noise if you don’t switch it up occasionally. And while familiarity is definitely a positive thing, being tuned out is not.
Getting in Front of the Game
If you wait to change your practices until you begin to see a decline in sales, you will be stuck playing catch-up, reacting to a bad situation. You will have lost ground to regain, lost customers to earn back and lost income to make up.
Instead of reacting, always on the defensive, refreshing your campaigns proactively allows you to go on the offensive.
Stay one step ahead of your competitors, and you can not only maintain the status quo, but also push the envelope on what is possible for your business.w