How a doctor’s appointment helped me think about marketing

My phone buzzed. Reminder: your doctor’s appointment is scheduled for tomorrow, March 27th, at 2:00 p.m.

I nodded along, half paying attention. I already had two different reminders from my wall calendars. I opened up another tab on Google Chrome when my laptop dinged. Doctor’s appointment is tomorrow.

Thanks.

My laptop ran slow though since my software was about six years behind. As a writer, I usually ended up with two Word docs, seven tabs, and a messenger app, which wasn’t a good combo.

As I waited for my laptop to catch up and load everything, I checked my email on my phone. I got another message: Reminder: your doctor’s appointment is scheduled for tomorrow, March 27th, at 2:00 p.m.

Plus a text from Mom: i got this from the doctors: Reminder: your doctor’s appointment is scheduled for tomorrow, March 27th, at 2:00 p.m.

By now, I was pretty annoyed at my doctor. I didn’t want to go. I wasn’t even reading the message fully anymore. I’d rather do anything else. But I also realized: marketing could work like that too.

When you have a product whether it’s a book or a company or a service, you have to market. But marketing too much hurts.

Marketing has a lot to do with timing. You don’t want to advertise too early to where customers will forget it’s coming out, but you also can’t advertise too late to where they have no time to get money together. Too much advertising or too less can hurt as well. It is almost like a reminder for a doctor’s appointment. If you advertise so much that you’d also get annoyed by seeing so many ads, that’s too much.

It has to be just right.

Think about your advertisements as personal, like an appointment. It’s a careful process.