When do you stop marketing?

Recently I got a great question about an article I shared on the Marketing Pie and the follow up question: when do you stop marketing?

Not when do you stop marketing in general, but how and when do you decide that a particular method isn’t working for you?

It’s foolish to think that marketing is the same for every business. Not only because customers are different but your message, style, offers, and so much more will dictate what marketing works best.

Think of it this way: some people are great on video. They’re engaging and informative, fun and make it appear effortless. Forcing someone who hates the camera, doesn’t have a good talking flow, and a major case of the shifty eyes to do video marketing is a mistake.

The first sign to stop marketing is when you hate doing it, but that doesn’t let you off the hook entirely. If you’re getting results, then the easiest way to manage your marketing is hire someone to do it for you as long as it’s profitable.

Most of the time, you don’t need to stop marketing; it just needs refinement. It could be your message that needs a different take to be more compelling and action oriented. Maybe your message is great but you’re presenting it to the wrong market. And perhaps it’s simply the wrong medium and not one that your ideal client is tuned into.

The only way you’ll know if something is working is to track your input and output. This doesn’t have to be a hugely complicated process – it can be as simple as an Excel spreadsheet to log your time and expenses for the input. To know the effectiveness of your marketing, you’ll need to know where your clients are coming from and the easiest way is to simply ask.

Sure there’s tracking software and CRM programs that will do this automatically and if that’s set up, great. But if you’re just starting out, manual tracking is not only good, but it’s often more concrete to enter the numbers yourself.

When it comes to making marketing adjustments, try the rule of 3

Give your marketing 3 months or 3 adjustments before throwing in the towel and only make a switch when you can identify 3 better possibilities.

For example, if your audience logs into Facebook daily and follows fan pages and registers for webinars, but they’re not registering for your webinar than don’t give up after a single campaign. Do your research, get some insights from the experts, and continue to tweak. Sure you could bounce to Pinterest and LinkedIn and bench ads and then banner ads, but if your audience doesn’t hang out in those places you’re just wasting time and money.

In reality, you’re never going to stop marketing but if your current marketing isn’t bringing in the leads and clients that you need, then give it a fair shake before quitting.

As entrepreneurs, you have to remember that our attention spans are short and the grass will always be greener. Don’t be afraid to tweak and adjust and try little changes along the way.

Action Step: Identify one marketing activity that you don’t think is paying off and track your results for the next week.