What does keeping fit have in common with Marketing your business?

August 31, 2007 by Matt Eve · Leave a Comment
Filed under: General Rants 

I’m very proud of myself, for the last 8 weeks or so I have managed to go to the gym twice a week. It was painful at first and I tried to come up with excuses not to do it. Now I feel much better and actually can’t wait until it is a ‘gym day’.

But what does this have to do with business growth and marketing? Well apart from giving me energy to get things done it occurred to me there are a lot of similarities with the results you get from taking regular exercise as there are with doing regular marketing.

I think it is human nature for us to want things and want them now. We tend to overestimate what we can do in the short term and underestimate what we can achieve long term.

Take a look at any gym in the first 2 or 3 weeks of January and you will see it is a hive of activity. Everyone is fresh with the new years resolutions and good intentions. People set themselves impossible goals of training for 1.5 hours per session 3 times a week. very quickly it all becomes too much and they give up too soon not getting to see any results.

The best approach, and the one I am taking with the gym, is to go only twice a week for 30 minutes at a time. This is enough time to give me an effective workout, but not so long that it takes a big chunk out of my day.

The same goes with marketing. If you try and do too much in one go it becomes overwhelming and you end up giving up, before achieving any real results. Instead you need to just do a little on a regular basis.

What if you were to send out 20 sales letters every day? Once the letter is written, printing and putting 20 into envelopes each day isn’t going to take any longer than 30 minutes. If you did this for a year then that could be 5000 letters out there helping promote your services. A 1% response would give you 50 new customers over the year. Customers that you wouldn’t otherwise have had.

Getting fit and keeping in shape doesn’t have to be difficult, neither does steadily growing your business. What we all struggle with is being consistent. But little and often is going to leave you both fitter and better off.

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