Bad Habits Can Kill Your Marketing Efforts

When it comes to marketing, your problem isn't a lack of effort—even if you haven't pulled the trigger on that new website (cough), or gotten around to this year's holiday mailing. The truth is, you're marketing every day, every time you engage your customer base:

Every customer phone call and email you respond to
Every customer phone call and email you initiate
Every marketing campaign you execute
Every blog post you publish
Every forum or social networking message you post
Every time you describe what you do for a living to someone you meet
Every time you deliver a product or service to a customer
Every time you leave your business card somewhere
Every question you answer
Every payment you collect

Clearly, the problem isn't that you aren't doing enough. The real issue is that you're not putting enough thought into how you're doing these everyday things.

The Danger of Relying on Habits

When you execute the tasks above out of habit, it's easy to forget that they're actually two-sided transactions. You're delivering a message during each task, and the person on the other end is receiving that message. This is true even if you're not saying anything. Filling an order? The package the order is shipped in sends a message. The very process you've set up that your customer has to pass through sends a message—how many times they have to click through your site, how long it takes them to find your phone number, and so on. Even if you're not thinking about the message you're sending, the customer is still receiving it.

Replacing Bad Habits with Better Messages

So why do we keep perpetuating current habits? You already know: it's simply easier than identifying and transitioning into better habits. And by better habit, I mean something very specific: I mean a message that bridges the gap between speaker and listener, delivered in a way that makes it easier for the listener to understand. This is a process I'm going through myself as I redesign my now mythical website, and I really feel for organizations who are struggling with it.

Developing a thoughtful message, and then delivering it, takes deliberation. But it doesn't necessarily take pain. In fact, when you rely on a specific step-by-step process, it can be almost enjoyable (or, "a wonderful learning experience," as one of my clients once put it). The process looks something like this:

• Identify the message(s) you're currently sending
• Identify the message(s) your market wants to hear
• Take a good hard look in the mirror
• Connect the dots between what your organization provides and what your market wants
• Control each transaction so the agreed-on message gets through
• Measure the reaction to your efforts
• Adjust the messaging as much as necessary until you get it right
  

The Most Dangerous Habit of All

Obviously, developing better messaging habits takes a lot of work and a lot of insight. It can be so challenging, in fact, that most organizations end up perpetuating the worst habit of all—they skip over the discovery stages of the process and jump straight into creating new messages. If you yourself take one message away from this article, I hope it's this: don't skip the discovery.

The discovery, in which you take that good hard look at what you're doing (and what your market really wants you to do), is almost the whole point. It's the process that you've been skipping this whole time. It's what makes the habits hard to break. And if you continue to skip it, opting instead to just churn out some new marketing message based on current assumptions, you're just replacing one bad habit with another. That's a waste of time and money, and a way to miss real opportunities. So take a moment to think it all through. Research. Observe. Explore. Do it on your own, get help if you must, but do it. Because old habits die hard—but not if you kill them carefully.