Since our first post on this subject was so popular, here is another in what will now become perhaps an endless series of posts.

Today, let us discuss wasting money with excessively diluted marketing campaigns.

What do I mean by that?

Let’s say you have a marketing budget for the year of $30,000.

A cable network salesperson contacts you and pitches you on spending $3,000 a month on TV commercials. That sounds exciting, especially when they tell you they have a special deal, this week only, where they will produce the commercial for free and you get four 30 second spots a day. 120 spots per month! We gonna get rich!!

Not.

Four spots a day means one every six hours, across probably several channels. How would anyone even notice that you are communicating?

Repetition is an essential factor to successful marketing. The average American is exposed to some 3,000 marketing messages per day. It takes repeated exposure before a new message even rises above the noise level (a technical term) to a point where someone starts to notice your message.

You might as well have taken that $30,000, tied a brick to it and tossed it overboard. It’ll cause just about as much affect.

This isn’t theoretical. I’ve had more than one client come to me who did exactly that ($30,000 on TV commercials, not thrown overboard). In one case there was no measurable effect on their stats. In the other case, they had better track of where their inflow came from, in that entire year, they got exactly one new patient from the TV commercials (both of these were in health care).

There are many other examples possible of this marketing error. Direct mail campaigns sent once or twice to a list, then move on or give up. We’ve seen tremendously successful campaigns that mailed to the same list month after month for years. We documented one case where a person responded to the 24th mailing piece they received.

I know of a business owner who when he first started advertising, ran an expensive ad twice with almost no response. He ran it a third time and got buried in calls. He ran that same ad with minor variations for years, until he sold the business for a 7 figure price.

The moral of the story is when planning a marketing campaign, don’t count on instant results – and match your marketing channel to your budget.

You’re welcome.