Our company strategy strongly incorporates the law of diminishing returns.
The Law of Diminishing Returns (anticipated by Anne Robert Jacques Turgot and implied by Thomas Malthus in 1798) states that increasing one variable of an equation while keeping the rest of the variables constant will eventually yield a result opposite the intended purpose of the variable change. In plain English, it simply means sometimes, you can push an idea too far.
The law originated during an attempt to prove a point about agriculture. The question was: will more crops be harvested if more harvesters are hired to work the land? The answer in the short term was yes, because the quantity of crops harvested was directly related to the manpower behind the harvesting. However, the law of diminishing returns showed that if you hired too many harvesters, productivity and final cost actually worked in an opposing way. Because the amount of land didn't increase, there would be too many harvesters, each doing only a little work. Therefore, productivity actually decreased. Moreover, the cost of hiring all the harvesters was high, especially considering that lowered productivity. The law of diminishing returns proved there's a point at which hiring more harvesters actually hurts the farm's bottom line. (courtesy of Jack Aaronson, Clickz.com).
In the web marketing industry, ideas are pushed to far all the time. Many SEO companies strive for 99% perfection when optimizing a site for a small business. The optimization is great, but it takes twice as much time to go from 80-99% as it did to go from 1-80%, which means that the extra 19% of efficiency was 2/3rds of the total cost of optimization. Keeping the site up to date with current strategies and practices will again cost much more for 99% efficiency than it would for 80% efficiency. The worst part is that all the extra expense is often all for a very marginal amount of additional traffic. Although this strategy is great for the profits SEO firms, this waste of money is a devastating blow to a small business that could spend the difference on truly effective marketing. Unfortunately, we hear about this all the time.
At NetMark Essentials, we use a balanced strategy to continually optimize and maintain all of your essential web marketing, without going overboard on anything. This means you can afford to run marketing campaigns on multiple channels instead of just one or two, and you’ll capture the bulk of the benefit from each channel. Essentially, your return on investment (ROI) will be much higher with us than it will with other web marketing firms that don’t know when enough is enough. |
