Consistency Counts for a Lot in Digital Marketing
If content is king in digital marketing, then consistency is queen. It’s the power behind the throne that ensures the message is heard. Don’t disregard the true value of consistency because even a short lapse in consistency can have disastrous consequences.
Stephen Hawking said, “Half the battle is just showing up.” That’s as true to digital marketing success as it is to personal success. If your digital marketing takes an unexcused absence, your audience is likely to terminate their attention for it.
A while ago we started working with a career consultant that had halted her weekly email marketing campaign to do some “updating”. The two primary focuses of making a change were to migrate to a different marketing platform and bring in help to administer the campaign. It took a total of six weeks to get the new platform in place, bring us onboard, agree to a new campaign strategy, and have the first communication queued for a send. During that six week period all the other channels (SEO, Social Media, PPC, and offline promotions) all continued to run as they had in the past.
Once the campaign was ready for launch, we pulled up the most recent tracking data from the website to serve as a baseline for performance. Our new client was shocked to see that her total traffic had decreased by roughly seventy-five percent!
After re-establishing her email campaign, we made strides to recover that traffic but a full recovery was just over two years away. Meaning a six week lapse in consistency took about eighteen times as long to bounce back.
Why was the drop so steep? It’s not that her audience forgot about her but rather that they had grown accustomed to her emails and the schedule at which they arrived. When that schedule was disrupted without warning the email traffic obviously ceased but to compound the problem, she was no longer top of mind, so her audience paid less attention to her other channels as well.
If you have established consistency in your digital marketing, be very cautious about disrupting it. If you intend to make a technical or strategic transition, make sure there is an interim way of continuing your campaign until the new process is ready to go live. If that’s impossible because of technical or resource constraints, then it’s advisable to alert your audience to a pending upgrade. That at least puts a positive spin on the lapse in consistency, can provide alternate channels to fill the void, and can serve as a teaser to keep the value in your communications fresh in their mind.
More commonly trainers, consultants, and professional coaches struggle to establish digital marketing consistency. If you find that your digital marketing struggles to get traction with your audience, a lack of consistency could very well be the problem. After all if you aren’t showing up regularly, you are forfeiting half the battle.