Dance With Strangers

What is the one habit you can’t kick? You have one; at LEAST one. Want to know one of mine? I have to drink two cups of coffee in the morning and then one diet Coke with lunch and then one more coffee at 4pm. There you go, I’ve included a habit with my obsessive compulsive disorder. Habits come in a variety of flavors, ranging from innocent to life-threatening.

Habits are often placed in a negative light, and in most cases rightfully so. Yet as a B2B marketer one of your goals is to create habit-forming campaigns in order to lead generation and cultivation. Why do you use drip email? Why do you execute webcasts on a monthly basis? Why are advertising buys predicated on daily, weekly or monthly runs? The list goes on and on, but ultimately you should be planning out your activities so that you can take advantage of the natural habit behaviors of humans, which I assume your customers are ultimately, until the robots take over.

The first time I came across this concept was after reading Habit: The 95% of Behavior Marketers Ignore, a terrific look at how marketers ignore this natural human instinct. Using habit-based marketing techniques is more than simply throwing out materials on a regular basis. Let’s look at five keys to creating habits through your marketing in order to generate more and more qualified leads.

1. Be Regular–put out content on a regular basis.
2. Be Different–use different platforms to put out the content, not everyone likes eMail and not everyone knows what RSS can do.
3. Be Consistent–your company voice should have a consistency throughout the different content and throughout the year.
4. Be Creative–encourage resourceful design to make emails easier to read, use audio/video to make more personable, etc.
5. Be Useful–don’t put our content for the sake of the first four points above. Before you send anything out ask, “Will this help my customers?”.

It’s time to introduce habitually good marketing to your audience.