Rob Eagar’s Monday Morning Marketing Tip
is written to help authors, publishers, and organizations
spread their message like wildfire.
This week’s focus:
Social media is luring a lot of people to believe that marketing shouldn’t cost them anything. “Free” is becoming the new promotional budget. The danger with this mindset is that it can lead to a position of complacency. Most people need to feel invested in an important activity in order to see it through to completion.
For example, one of my friends has a Ph.D in counseling and runs his own private practice. He’s spent hundreds of hours helping people work through their most difficult life issues. Yet, he recently told me that his experience has shown that people who come to him for counseling on someone else’s dime rarely make progress. That’s right, people who receive free counseling rarely heed the advice of the counselor and experience positive change. That’s because they have no money invested in the process to keep them engaged and accountable. In contrast, counselees who pay his full fee on their own are much more likely to participate in the counseling process and experience positive results, because they are personally invested.
This same dynamic applies to marketing. There’s a tendency to let promotional efforts slip when you don’t have any financial “skin in the game.” If you’re tired, distracted, or lazy, then it’s easy to think, “I’m too busy to blog, Twitter, or FaceBook today. Besides, they’re free, so it doesn’t cost me anything.” Whereas, if you’ve spent time creating a database of targeted leaders and hired a graphic artist to design a nice-looking newsletter, you’re more likely to feel invested and follow-through on that activity.
Try this litmus test. If Facebook and Twitter started charging $100 a month, would you still use them? In addition, are you getting enough return on investment via social media marketing to justify the amount of time you expend? If yes, go forth and prosper. If not, then it’s time to make a change and focus your marketing on other tactics, even if they cost money. The goal isn’t activity, the goal is success.
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