I used to think that being consistent with marketing meant constantly doing marketing.
Posting every day. Sending more emails. Checking my ads. Updating my website. Looking at my analytics. Creating something new because apparently the content I made three days ago had already fulfilled its life’s purpose and could never be used again.
There was always something else I could be doing – and because there was always something else I could be doing, it was very easy to feel like I was never doing enough.
This is one of the problems with marketing advice in general. We talk a lot about consistency, but we rarely define what that actually means. So business owners hear “be consistent” and translate it into “be visibly working on my marketing at all times.”
Those are not the same thing.
Consistency doesn’t have to mean creating seven new pieces of content every week. It might mean publishing one genuinely useful thing every Wednesday. It doesn’t have to mean launching a new campaign every month. It might mean keeping one campaign running long enough to gather enough data to make a reasonably informed decision about it.
And it definitely doesn’t mean checking your numbers fourteen times a day to see whether anything exciting has happened since lunch.
Your marketing should be able to keep doing at least some of its job when you are not actively tending to it. Your website can answer questions. An email sequence can follow up with someone who downloaded a resource. A strong blog post can continue bringing people to your site. An ad can run without requiring you to personally stand beside it and supervise.
Obviously, none of those things are completely “set it and forget it.” Everything needs to be checked, updated, and improved eventually. But there is a significant difference between periodically managing a marketing system and needing to manually power every part of it every day.
This has become especially obvious to me in a season when I cannot assume I’ll have the same amount of energy from one day to the next. I’ve had to look at my businesses and ask: What continues working when I’m not?
And, perhaps more importantly: What stops completely because I am the only thing keeping it alive?
That question has been… informative.
This Week’s Clarity Cue:
Choose one part of your marketing that currently requires you to show up manually every single time. Then ask yourself whether you could simplify it, schedule it, automate part of it, or create something that can be reused.
You do not need to build an elaborate marketing machine this week. Just find one thing that could continue doing its job without requiring your constant attention.
Comment and tell me what you chose. I’d love to know what everyone is trying to make a little easier.