I stumbled across the phrase “random acts of marketing” recently and it’s still got me chuckling to myself several weeks later.

Clever phrases can sometimes capture the essence of something so concisely that it is immediately provokes insight.

Random acts of marketing is one such phrase.

But why is it making me chuckle? Well, because this approach is a very real strategy for a great many businesses, and it is precisely what professional marketers battle against day in, day out.

If businesses were run on random acts of book-keeping, or random acts of production, it’s almost a given that they will fail. Engaging in random acts of human resources, or random acts of compliance would be just considered peculiar. Random days of opening or random approaches to pricing? Nope, not doing that either.

Business is anything but random.

Marketing, on the other hand, well that can be as random as you like, obviously.

Here are some incredibly common requests I have had over the span of my marketing career:

“We need a little bit of marketing….”

“Can we do a marketing push on this…”

“What we need is some publicity….”

“We just need to get the word out about what we do…”

“We just need to find the right channel that works for us…”

Marketing. Switch it on, switch it off. Random.

Here’s the thing: marketing should not be random. In fact it should be the very opposite of random.

Marketing is the engine room of your business. Engines convert energy (effort) into motion (progress). Every time you switch the engine off, progress STOPS.

That’s why marketers build systems, and processes, and repeatedly stick to them. They innovate within the system, and create clever strategies that work within the structure of that plan. They don’t just operate randomly. They are building finely tuned engine rooms. It’s not about a single social media post that goes viral (that’s a game of chance or luck), it’s about regular social media posts that build engagement. The same applies to any form of media.

The on/off switch or random acts might be cheaper, and possibly more fun, but in the long term they don’t deliver progress.

I once worked with a client whose approach to marketing was as random as it came. Haphazard, price based promotions, randomly applied, creating huge sales spikes and equally massive sales troughs.

I took the essence of their approach which was to “offer a great deal” every so often so customers would go crazy but scaled it up to a weekly campaign approach, crossing multiple channels, with a balance of price led offers and informational campaigns. Guess what? Their business grew.

Not only that, they had more consistent cash flow and higher profitability.

It took a while for them to get comfortable with the new systematic (and, in their opinion, “boring” approach to marketing) but the results spoke for themselves and, in the end, even they couldn’t argue (they tried, many times!) that this consistency was driving their business forward.

I could see that they missed the drama of the rollercoaster on/off approach to marketing, but the facts were that approach wasn’t serving their business well.

Consistent, regular and, by all means, creative marketing activities win hand over fist when it comes to generating sustainable outcomes.

The next time you reach for a random act of marketing to boost your coffers, stop and ask yourself why your approach is so sporadic. Is it the drama you crave? Or have you no patience for consistency.

You might be surprised the answer has nothing to do with business at all.