Kelford Labs Daily: The secret of effective marketing
One thing at a time.
“This is the ‘secret’ of those people who ‘do so many things’ and apparently so many difficult things. They do only one at a time. As a result, they need much less time in the end than the rest of us.
The people who get nothing done often work a great deal harder.”
— Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive
Everyone knows multi-tasking is a myth and yet most marketers attempt it anyway.
Not just in their day-to-day work—overlapping unrelated tasks on top of one another, getting very little done, very hectically—but in their overall strategy.
Most marketers attempt to target every type of customer at once, and promote every type of product to them at the same time.
Restaurants want you to know about every option. Tourism destinations want you to know about every region and operator.
Software companies want you to know about every feature.
They’re multi-tasking their marketing, but they’re not getting anything done.
Because nobody wants everything, and nobody cares about all the options.
They want to know about what they want to know about, and they just don’t pay attention to things that target somebody else, about something else.
Instead, effective marketers focus on one thing at a time, one type of customer at a time, and one task at a time.
And they accomplish so much more as a result.
Half-doing many things is less helpful than actually doing one thing.
So, today, let’s think of one customer we want to focus on.
We’ll think of one thing they care about.
We’ll think about one way we can uniquely help them.
And about one time and one place where we can reach them at their moment of greatest need.
And then we’ll write them one simple message, about one single thing we do.
Or, we can work a great deal harder, and accomplish a great deal less.
