Month: August 2008

GREAT post about reps and the relationship.

I posted a few days ago about Vincent Laforet’s fascinating article about the changing industry. He’s done a follow-up on his new blog. It’s mostly an encouragement to discuss the issues, but it’s definitely worth thinking about and participating in, I think (though for some reason my comment from yesterday has not yet shown up).

The new edition (7th) of the ASMP Business Practices book (a.k.a. the “business bible”) is now available! It’s chock full of helpful info and I really encourage all of you to get it. I wrote parts of it and the other contributors are all fabulous. You can get more info here (don’t forget to click on the table of contents tab) and order it directly there too. There is, of course, a discount for ASMP members.

Yes, things are going to be bumpy for a while. Here’s a USA Today article about ad spending, and it’s not pretty. 

Don’t panic, though. This is the time for sane thinking. Keep marketing, cut back on other spending, and you can ride it out. If you cut your marketing, you’ll have a much harder time coming out of it, so try not to pull back there.

This business (like most businesses) has cycles–this is just the icky down-bit. It will get better. When? Well that’s the million-dollar question, of course, but sooner or later, it will. By keeping your head now, working on your vision, keeping in touch with old clients and new targets, when they do need someone, you are more likely to be top-of-mind.

There are several studies out that show that, all other things being equal, those people who keep food diaries lose about twice as much weight as those who don’t. That is, those who wrote down every single thing they ate ate less and lost weight. It seems to work best when the diary was shown to someone else as well–like showing your spouse/partner every day.

So what does this have to do with marketing? Accountability. 

You can use this same technique to be better with your marketing. In a food diary, maybe your goal every day is 1800 calories. In your marketing diary, it could be to accomplish at least three marketing-related tasks every (work) day. Call up some targets to try and get meetings, that’s one; research a few new potential targets, that’s two; update your blog, that’s three. 

When we write things down, they become more real in our monkey brains. Over time, we can see all that we have accomplished, and that helps to remind us about how much we actually can do (on those days when we feel like slugs). That is motivating. It can help us to remember that we can and actually do get things done, which is often a big problem for creatives (esp. those with ADD). And it can help to remind us that no matter how much we have to do, breaking it up into small bits and doing some every day will (usually) be more effective than trying to get it all done NOW.

On the other side, when you write down what you are doing every day (eating or marketing) you can begin to see problems before they become big problems. You can “catch yourself” after you make one or two missteps, rather than after you’ve really made a big error, and that makes corrections much easier.

So why not try a “marketing diary” to keep track of what you do every day for your marketing?