Time is your most precious marketing asset. You can increase your marketing budget, you can hire more staff, you can add vendors, but you have a fixed amount of time. You have the same amount of time as every one of your competitors. So using it effectively can actually be a competitive advantage. And I wanna talk about how you can do that by balancing two kinds of time in your marketing program.
Jenny Odell has a book called Saving Time, and she talks about these two kinds of time as using the Greek names as Kronos and Kyros.
Kronos
Kronos is clock time, right? That’s the steady march of time. It’s the hours and minutes that you have. In marketing your opportunity with Kronos is your steady state programs. Being efficient and effective with them, but also most importantly, being persistent, sticking with what you’re doing over time. Many businesses start a marketing program, and it may be the best program in the world, but they stop after things get less exciting, month, two, three months out, and it falls off. The companies that win with Kronos marketing, are those that stick with their programs for a long time. Think blog posts, other content creation over time. Nurture programs, nurture campaigns, thought leadership. All of these, the payoff doesn’t come in the single event today. The payoff comes from the accumulation of the goodwill or the impressions, or the consistent message reminding them of who you are and what your value is.
Kyros
Kyros is opportunity time. Think timing instead of time, right? It’s the right time, or, you know, harvest time season, all those, those things where it’s when you do it, where you create the opportunity. In marketing, this has a different rhythm to it for you. So here, the outcome of successful Kyros marketing is things like viral content, where you strike a nerve, you’re in the right place at the right time with the right message and the right experience, and it blows up. Kyros wins because of you’re leveraging, energy and power that’s much bigger than your company, right? It’s the industry or the news cycle or, customer, anxiety or excitement, whatever it might be. It’s outside of what you do. You amplify your opportunity by hitting that opportunity with your marketing engagement.
Balance
So, both of these are valuable obviously, but you have a limited amount of time. So the key here is to balance and have both. If you put all of your eggs in the Kronos basket, you’ll build a slow and steady and, and very capable marketing program. But when things change in the market, you will miss opportunities, right? Because you won’t be able to adapt or ride that big opportunity. If you focus only on Kyros, which a lot of people are tempted to do, because that’s the exciting stuff. What happens is you’re shooting at these opportunities, but the reality is your success rate for Kyros opportunities goes up dramatically if you’ve done your homework and paid your dues with your Kronos programs over time. That has built that asset brand, perception of you that now can be used as fuel when you do find those, that opportunity for a new product launch or a new newsworthy news jacking message.
So, again, time is so important because you are not differentiated in how much you get, you are differentiated in how you use it. So I encourage you to think about those two kinds of time in your marketing.
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