Great Marketing is a Yawn

Yawn and the world yawns with you. Well, sort of.

Yawning is clearly contagious. Next time you are in a room with people, feign a sleepy yawn and watch how many people yawn in return.

Better yet, set a measurement to it: count the number of people that return your yawn and divide that by the total number of people in the room. Maybe you’ll come up with a metric like 7 out of 10 (70%) people yawn when they see someone else yawn.

This would be a measurement of the contagiousness of your yawn. If yawning is truly contagious, your number might even exceed 100% since you could create a never-ending chain of yawning.

Now, take this same concept and apply it to your marketing.

Measure the contagiousness of your marketing message: count the number of people that respond to your marketing message and divide that by the total number of message recipients. This is also known as a Response Rate but it is the first step in understanding how transmittable your message is.

If the message continues to spread—like a yawn—your responder to recipient proportion might exceed 100% and you could have a very contagious message on your hands.

Is your marketing message transmittable? Can you leverage one message and have it spread virally across multiple recipients? Does your word-of-mouth proliferate?

To move your business to the next level, make sure your marketing message is as contagious as a yawn.