Every day Americans attempt to cram more productivity into fewer hours. It usually occurs at the expense of efficiency. What appears to be “business” on the surface is usually nothing more than “busy-ness” at its core. Neither are alike in any way.
Rather than take a break for a much needed mental rest, or even get up to stretch, most people choose to keep pushing themselves and everyone around them to do more, more, more. We recommend taking a nap rather than overextending yourself. And while it may seem like a stretch to apply the benefits of napping to marketing performance, much can be gained from a short pause in activity.
Wait. What?
That’s right. Napping.
Marketing performance is a difficult pursuit where the ground rules and goal posts appear to move every day. To coin a phrase from Mr. Dooley, marketing ain’t bean-bag. It requires creativity, analysis, technical skills, constant maintenance, and even a fair bit of damage control.
In the end, the credit for success usually lands in someone else’s lap – for example: the party animals in the Sales Department. However, blame for failure almost always comes back to marketing.
In that regard, the fresh ideas that you need to stay ahead of the curve only come from fresh minds, which brings us back to napping.
It’s no secret that Divining Point employs a unique model that gives us an edge. While we’re not a certified Results Only Work Environment (ROWE), we embrace many of its standards. To us, and for your benefit, we only focus on what matters most: marketing performance. What matters least is where we are, when we do it, how we do it, or why we do it the way we do. Ultimately, your goals are met. You succeed. We succeed.
At Divining Point, we take naps. You should, too.
The Benefits of Rest
Much has been written about the relationship between sleep and achievement. It’s directly analogous to marketing performance in more ways than one.
The National Sleep Foundation offers this key benefit of napping:
“Naps can restore alertness, enhance performance, and reduce mistakes and accidents. A study at NASA on sleepy military pilots and astronauts found that a 40-minute nap improved performance by 34% and alertness 100%.”
You’re probably thinking: “Isn’t that just sleeping on the job?”
No. It’s being ready for the job.
If you consider that tiredness is a response to over activity and burnout is a complete crash, as an organism your business should plan for periods of quiet where you can refocus your efforts and avoid the negative effects of oversaturation.
Putting this in marketing terms:
Your marketing efforts not only deplete your company’s resources, they also strain your customers. Constantly shouting about your brand eventually turns people away. Pushing, pushing, PUSHING your buyers with the same message and the same methods forces them to run away and land in some other company’s arms.
Think of It Like Flighting
Flighting is a cyclical technique to advertise your brand. It involves pushing your ads, then turning them off, and then turning them back on with new value propositions and messaging.
Recent theory suggests that flighting is bad for business, but we beg to differ. For seasonal businesses (like travel or apparel brands), flight makes complete sense. It shifts the focus to those times when sales are more likely to occur. But for other industries, flighting – or a hiatus – can be just as beneficial.
Take into consideration the negative effects of oversaturation, which is no doubt the result of continuous promotions and advertising. If you spread your marketing efforts too thinly over a longer period of time, you lose the ability to make an impact on those buyers you desire most.
If you continue to bang the drum everywhere all the time your audience will tune you out and opt out of your ads. This is the equivalent of strapping a muzzle to your face.
Similarly, if you don’t focus your efforts to target your specific buyers, and if you don’t tailor your message specifically for them, you waste money and resources on activities that will never yield an ROI.
Do You Seriously Take Naps?
Yes, we do. Our team works long hours when it makes sense. We also take naps when it makes sense. It all contributes to marketing performance.
When looking at your marketing strategy, you can’t effectively be “ON” all the time without incurring some cost – literal or otherwise.
New platforms, new techniques, new campaigns, new products, new seasons, new trends, new staff… these are the ever-shifting sands in the terrain. Staying engaged in the push is paramount. But strategic pauses are a restorative force that moves you faster and further than your worn out competition.
Don’t deceive yourself into thinking that this is a wholesale termination of marketing. That’s not good. Instead this is the agile refocusing, redirecting, and restructuring of your marketing campaigns in a way that provides relief for you and for your customer.
The end result is a higher level of marketing performance.