Marketing Habits

Do you consistently attract enough new customers to your business? While a fortunate few are inundated with customers, most businesses are not. So should we resign ourselves to our fate, or is there something we can do to move the dial? Something that doesn’t involve an impracticable amount of time or money. Marketing habits.

Marketing can seem mystifying to the uninitiated. There is complexity to it. Diverse channels, an evolving landscape, and the challenge of attributing results to specific marketing efforts. If we want to see more enquiries or a higher footfall in our business, marketing obviously plays a role. But where should we start, especially if money and time is tight? There are a variety of things to consider. Our value proposition, customer journey, pricing, messaging. We should also reflect on our own marketing habits.

what is a habit?

A habit is a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up. The part I most like about that definition is ‘hard to give up’. We know from our own experience, and from our work with hundreds of businesses, that marketing is the most common thing people stop doing when time is in short supply. So, how do we create a habit so strong it is hard to give up?

a simple framework for creating habits

How can we establish a marketing habit for ourselves and our business? Below is a simple framework to help elevate our normal routine and establish the habit we want.

Wish

This is the spark that ignites our habit, and it’s more than just a hope or desire. It’s a clear vision in our minds of the habit we want to form. When we imagine ourselves with our new habit, how much time are we putting aside for marketing? Which channels and tactics are we focusing on?

Want

This is the feeling associated with the wish. If the wish tells us where we want to get to, the want believes that we can do it. Without it, we may feel unable to do the things we know our business needs. If we don’t want it, we need to bring someone into our team who does.

Plan

Our wish may seem ambitious or feel overwhelming, but we can achieve it with the right plan. What are the activities we will undertake? Make them specific, manageable things that we feel comfortable doing. Small consistent steps can lead to big results.

Do

It’s vital to prioritise action. Identifying the right approach and coming up with the right plan are important; but ultimately we have to ‘do’ in order to ‘have’. What is the thing that we consistently do each day or each week to attract new customers to our business?

Have

This is the result. The consistent flow of customers to our business

it takes time

Habits aren’t formed overnight. They evolve over time and with practice. The ‘21-day rule’ is a popular belief that it takes 21 days to form a new habit, but research suggests it's more complex than that. One study* found that it takes on average 66 days for a new behaviour to become automatic; with a range of 18 to 254 days, depending on the individual and the habit.

That to me is interesting. How often do we attempt new habits, only to give up after a short time? Maybe you can relate to the frustration of thinking you’ve established a new habit, only for it to fade away a few weeks or months later. Knowing it could take up to 9 months to form a strong, lasting habit changes our perspective.

* 'How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world' by Phillippa Lally et al., published in the European Journal of Social Psychology in 2010