How Much Marketing is Enough for Agencies?

The Arndt-Schulz rule in pharmacology states that for every substance, small doses stimulate, moderate doses inhibit, and large doses kill. 

That’s an idea that doesn’t just apply to drugs, but so many other things: meetings, exercise, stress, confidence, research. 

That might explain why it feels like your agency is doing the right thing, but not seeing the results you want. The dosage is wrong. 

Here’s what it looks like from a scientific perspective. 

One of the hardest aspects of sales and marketing for firms is understanding where their “therapeutic window” is. Once you’ve established your sales and marketing actions, how much do you need to do to yield results? 

Should you be emailing your prospects every week? Posting on LinkedIn everyday? Is once a month enough? Do too little and you’ll never see a return. Do too much and you’ll get a negative reaction and potentially end a relationship before it starts. 

There’s no steadfast rule. Every audience has a different tolerance and every activity has a different intensity of effect. 

But, nearly every agency I’ve worked with that isn’t growing in the way they like falls to the far left of this graph. There are no signs of bioinhibition via oversaturation. In fact, they’re not doing enough. 

It takes a lot to kill your audience with marketing activities. That’s no excuse not to be respectful of their brain and time - you still need to index on quality. That’s what makes this hard. Anyone can spin up generic blog content and lazy outbound emails, but they’ll find out that the therapeutic window for that sort of BS is incredibly small, if not non-existent.

In other words, quality over quantity, but the more of it the better.