No marketing resolutions — Kelford Labs Weekly

I’m worried about something:

I’m worried you’re going to make a New Year’s resolution about your marketing.

I’m worried you’re thinking, “Next year will be different. Next year, I’m going to do more.”

But, and this is the whole point and purpose of this post, I have to warn you:

If you make that resolution, it won’t work.

Here’s why:

Resolution dissolution

So, right off the top, New Year’s resolutions, as a general principle, don’t work.

As Annie Duke wrote in How to Decide, “You’re not alone in quickly breaking your New Year’s resolution. Within a week, 23% of New Year’s resolutions are abandoned. And 92% of people never achieve their goal.”

Why? Well, for lots of reasons, but a major one is that they come from a place of guilt, not motivation.

Let’s face it, if we wanted to do the thing we’re resolving to do, we’d already be doing it.

But we don’t.

So telling ourself we’re suddenly going to do way more of the thing we hate might work for a couple weeks, but ultimately ol’ Stein’s Law rains on our parade: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

And so, we stop. Because we simply can’t bully ourselves into doing more of something we don’t like—at least not for long. Or at least not very well.

Marketing is a long game, and a creative one at that.

And let me tell you, creativity and compulsion are incompatible.

You’re not going to have very good content ideas or marketing thoughts begrudgingly. That’s just not how these things work.

So why do we feel compelled to make a resolution anyway? Well, first, there’s plain and simple procrastination—we don’t currently feel capable or compelled to do the thing, so we leave it to our future self.

Second, because everybody else is doing it. New Year’s resolutions are popular, so we fall into the same pit as everyone else. And since everyone else fails at their resolutions, we don’t really notice that we have, too.

But if we can accept that resolutions aren’t the solution, we can start looking for better ways to accomplish our goals.

Pace over performance

As I’ve said before, the reason your marketing is struggling is not because you don’t know what to do—it’s because you hate it.

It’s a chore, an obligation.

But we already figured out how to tackle chores we don’t intrinsically want to do.

This is a solved problem: We turn them into habits.

We focus on a pace we can maintain, instead of exerting ourselves beyond what we can sustain.

A little bit of marketing every single day for a year will work way, way better than a lot of marketing for the first two weeks of January, I promise you.

So instead of committing to doing a ton of marketing next year, just do, like, five minutes of it today:

• Come up with two ideas for newsletters.
• Write down three past clients you can reach out to for customer research.
• Go comment on someone else’s LinkedIn post.

No, not next year. Now. Stop reading this—it’s basically done anyway—and go do a tiny bit of marketing.

And do a tiny bit again tomorrow. And a tiny bit the day after.

Once you’ve built the habit, once you’re used to doing a little bit, you can grow into it even more. Not because you have to, but because now you actually want to.

Because you’ll make it fun. You’ll turn your daily marketing time (even if that’s only 5 minutes) into a game where you try to outdo what you did yesterday.

And you’ll find yourself going from counting down the seconds until you can be done, to stretching a little bit beyond your timer so you can do even more.

Now, almost every time I give a client this advice, they respond with some variation on, “But I really need to do a lot more, I can’t start slow.”

So if you’re thinking that, I get you. What I’m saying is, if you want to get something up to speed without it tearing itself apart or seizing up, you start slow.

The different between nothing and something, no matter how small, is infinite.

So don’t discount the benefits of doing something instead of nothing. And trust yourself that once you’ve formed the habit, you’ll do more, better, than ever before.

But the way to building any habit—marketing included—isn’t to immediately kick the problem into next year. Or overcommit to something you’re unlikely to do at all.

It’s to get started, to keep a steady pace, and work at it until it works.

And if you truly believe you can do a lot next year, then I’m sure that means you can do a little right now.

So why not start today?

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