“Leads are slow.”

“It’s kind of quiet.”

“When was our last lead?”

These are some of the things I hear often from small business owners when we start the conversation about digital marketing.

Some of the first things I’ll look at are their website, their social media profiles and their search presence.

Almost always when I look at just those three areas, the recent digital activity for those small businesses are weak – or non-existent.

Whether their posts are stale, their website has become dated (or often broken/not working) – all of which can affect their search presence – there’s a “decayed” feeling when I look at their digital efforts.

I mentioned this in the “Relevance Delta” post, but three things I mentioned in there that are important were timing, rhythm and consistency when it comes to building relevance.

Of those three, likely the most important piece missing for small business folks is consistency.

And without consistency, it’s incredibly hard to build – and maintain – momentum.

Momentum is something vital for almost any system or function to maintain itself — and especially important for your overall marketing system.

If you’ve followed along here on this blog, you know I like to refer back to the Mathematics world for many of our business concepts — today I’m reaching into into the Physics world to help define momentum (if you boil Physics down far enough, you’ll find it’s mostly math to be fair – sorry Physics folks).

Momentum, noun:

strength or force gained by motion or by a series of events

As an object moves (accelerates), it picks up in strength – if it accelerates through a series of events, then momentum can build through each event.

A step further into the physics world, momentum is the product of an object’s mass and its velocity.

The greater the mass, the larger the momentum.

The higher the velocity, the larger the momentum.

Momentum In Digital Spaces

Looking back at the three elements of relevance: timing, rhythm and consistency – you might be able to see how closely related these are to the idea of momentum.

Consider each social media post you create or blog post you add to your website or any other piece of content you create for your digital channels a part of a collective “marketing object”.

Every social media post, blog published or whatever it might be acts an “event” that pushes your “marketing object” forward.

As you line up your post timing (more on this in another post), define your rhythm, and stay consistent, your “marketing object” will naturally start to pick up momentum.

This isn’t posting for posting’s sake, by the way — be sure to check out my posts on alignment and differentiation to make sure you’re pointed in the right direction (and aimed at the right audience, with the right message) before you start to build your momentum.

Momentum Carries You Through Valleys

As with any small business owner, you’re going to find yourself hitting little “peaks and valleys” throughout your time in business.

Peaks are always the fun part – leads, sales, revenue, growth.

Valleys can be excruciating — even more so without momentum.

However, if you’ve built up enough momentum there’s a really great chance it’s going to help you carry you through those valleys – and back into peaks.

Without that momentum, getting back out of the valley is much, much harder to do.

This is where I hear the “Leads are slow”, “It’s kind of quiet” words, painfully said.

Momentum Enables Future Revenue

As you start building your momentum, you might find things to be slow at first — this is perfectly normal.

You’ll notice that as it picks up, many activities that you start with will yield results days, weeks, months – sometimes years in the future.

In fact, in marketing in general, you’ll find that many activities are meant to build “future revenue”.

There are some things that can give you a natural/immediate revenue punch (leveraging paid channels, for example), but much of what you do today, is meant for tomorrow (and your future).

What Stops Momentum

Quite frankly, momentum starts to decay the minute your digital marketing activities slow down (or outright stop).

I see this often with solo folks — they put energy into sporadic marketing efforts that leads to a small amount of momentum built up.

Then their attention turns to projects/output/service – and their marketing activities slow down (or stop altogether).

When this happens, by the time they finish those projects or deliver that service, the momentum they built runs out.

They’ve hit a valley. They don’t have momentum. Leads slow down. And they have to keep cold starting their marketing. (And this cycle continues ad infitum.)

Other things can slow down overall momentum in your small business of course, but strictly speaking in the digital marketing world, it almost always slows down when activity slows down.

You Need Help Building, (And More Importantly) Sustaining Momentum

As you can imagine, coming up with a strategy, planning, creating (good) content, and getting it out into the world (social media posts, blog posts, resources, etc.) on a consistent basis is incredibly difficult – especially for small business owners and solo folks.

No matter how ambitious and organized one is with running their business, time will always feel short when it comes to these “momentum building” activities – time that should be focused on talking/working with their customers (why we’re in business in the first place).

Without momentum, things will inevitably slow down.

But with the right momentum and the right business helping you sustain it, you never know where that push might take you.