FM Walsh & Associates Inc.

Commit to your Marketing Plan

Are you the type that gets attracted by new shiny objects?  The latest gadgets, marketing tools, ideas and opportunities that come your way that take you (or your mind) off course?  It’s tempting to switch course when you think what you’re doing isn’t working, because you’ve tried it once or twice or a few times and you’re not seeing results.

Don’t switch course, just yet.  Marketing takes time and requires commitment to a strategy for a period of time before seeing results.  Just take a look at the excerpt below from Jay Conrad Levinson’s Guerilla Marketing on responding to advertisement:

1. The first time a man looks at an ad, he doesn’t see it.
2. The second time, he doesn’t notice it.
3. The third time, he is conscious of its existence.
4. The fourth time, he faintly remembers having seen it.
5. The fifth time, he reads the ad.
6. The sixth time, he turns up his nose at it.
7. The seventh time, he reads it through and says, “Oh, brother!”
8. The eighth time, he says, “Here’s that confounded thing again!”
9. The ninth time, he wonders whether it amounts to anything.
10. The tenth time, he will ask his neighbor if he has tried it.
11. The eleventh time, he wonders how the advertiser makes it pay.
12. The twelfth time, he thinks it must be a good thing.
13. The thirteenth time, he thinks it might be worth something.
14. The fourteenth time, he remembers that he wanted such a thing for a long time.
15. The fifteenth time, he is tantalized because he cannot afford to buy it.
16. The sixteenth time, he thinks he will buy it someday.
17. The seventeenth time, he makes a memorandum of it.
18. The eighteenth time, he swears at his poverty.
19. The nineteenth time, he counts his money carefully.
20. The twentieth time he sees the ad, the buys the article or instructs his wife to do so.

These steps were written by Thomas Smith in London in 1885, but I’m amazed at how accurately it describes our buying thought-process today.  There are no short cuts when it comes to your marketing plan.  Once you have come up with a sound plan, commit to it for at least three to six month as a minimum.  It takes at least that long to build awareness and conversion!