Here’s a question – what are your marketing cooldowns? This comes from a weird amalgamation of marketing, a hot shower, and World of Warcraft.
See, in World of Warcraft, especially as a spellcaster, you have spells you can cast that function like ammunition. Each spell can be fired with a mandatory wait between casts, called a cooldown. Some spells have longer cooldowns than others, meaning that you have to wait longer in between uses.
When it comes to marketing, our marketing tools have cooldowns, too. Take a look at this brief, incomplete list of marketing tools:
- Press releases
- Email promos
- SEO
- Twitter
- Blogging
- Podcasting
- Direct mail
- Cold calls
Here’s the question – how often can you use each of these tools, assuming you have reasonably good content and reasonably good products and services? If you were to send out email promotions day after day, hour after hour, you’d burn your list to the ground very quickly. If you were to send out press releases, how often could you spend $200-$600 before you hit diminishing returns?
That’s what I’d tentatively call a marketing cooldown – the time you need to let a tool rest so that you don’t suffer diminishing returns. If you’re putting together a calendar of marketing efforts as part of your planning, knowing the cooldowns on the various tools you have at your disposal would let you best determine how to allocate your resources in advance, rather than on the fly.
You’d know, for example, that your particular house list (every list varies) has a 5 business day cooldown – that if you send more frequently than that, your unsubscribe or complaint rate goes up. You’d know that your Twitter followers drop off faster if every 9 tweets is about your company vs. every 22 tweets. You’d know that SEO has diminishing returns after a point and once you get close to that limit, your efforts are best spent elsewhere.
I can’t tell you what your marketing cooldowns are, because every company, every industry, every customer database is radically different. Some house lists don’t mind 3 emails a day, like Peter Shankman’s HARO. Other lists won’t tolerate more than a quarterly update. Spend some time determining what your company’s cooldowns are, and you’ll rapidly improve your marketing effectiveness.
Bonus food for thought: as you level up in World Warcraft, meaning you become more and more powerful, more and more skilled, your cooldown times decrease. (assuming you gear properly, etc.) A level 70 spellcaster can use their spells faster and more effectively on average than a level 1 spellcaster. The same is true for your marketing efforts – the better your products and services are and the more skilled a marketer you become, the more often you can use your marketing tools to promote them, because more people will actively want to hear about how you can help them solve their problems. Once you know where you stand in terms of your tools and their cooldowns, work with the rest of your company to buff up your products and services, and you’ll find that marketing them becomes easier and easier.
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