I have a problem with most diets...

They expect you to eat regularly. I don't. Most days I don't even think about food until I hit the back door, which sometimes is close to 8 pm depending on the kid's schedules. Most working days I consume one meal and like 6,000 cups of coffee. Everybody tells me that eating one meal a day is bad, everybody tells me I've ruined my metabolism. I understand that my body needs fuel at regular intervals to work optimally. I just don't think about eating when I'm busy and I'm really, really busy. Unfortunately, I'm not so busy on the weekends, so I do think about and consume food often and this too, according to my scale, is not good.

This is a business blog, so here's the connection. Think of marketing as food that runs our organizations the same way we think of food fueling our bodies. Without enough fuel, our metabolisms slow down to conserve energy and they don't work as efficiently. Instead of consuming a steady diet of marketing during the recession, many organizations reduced their diet to a few marketing initiatives or none at all. This seemed like a good idea to save resources, but now they are left with sluggish organizations that don't respond to a healthy meal of marketing the way they would have had they been eating regularly.

 Here's a list of five marketing ideas to help jump-start your marketing metabolisms.

• Just like you're not supposed to skip breakfast, you can't skip communicating with customers even in a down economy. Luckily, since they are customers, they should be glad to hear from you, so bi-monthly emails focused on helping them (not promoting your wares) is effective and inexpensive marketing fuel. Focus on making the emails relevant and short.

• Eating one really big meal is bad because your body cannot burn a large amount of calories at a time. You aren't going to get as much results from one really large marketing campaign as you would get from regular marketing initiatives. Create a marketing calendar and plan multiple initiatives with specific objectives throughout the year to optimize results.

• As you make your meals smaller, the body will be able to burn almost all the calories efficiently. At the same time, the frequency keeps the metabolism working fast at all times. Mailing huge quantities so that a 1% response rate nets enough leads ends up not being as efficient as multiple small mailings targeting specific segments with relevant messaging. Plan your quantities such that your sales force can follow up with each recipient. You'll start relationships and improve the results of your mailings by 10 - 15% when your sales process can integrate seamlessly with your marketing. 

• Regular exercise helps speed up your metabolism and leads to an increase in the total number of calories you burn in a day. So too with your marketing and sales teams. Marketing develops processes and relationships with suppliers that result in higher levels of productivity for the whole team when they work out regularly. The time saved from the efficiency can be turned into strategic thinking time delivering new ways to achieve the organization's objectives. You'll be amazed how good your sales team can be if they practice calling, asking questions and listening on a regular basis. They will carry that productivity over into their client meetings too.

• Finally, stay away from crash diets as they exacerbate a slow metabolism. When you bring your calorie intake too low, the body goes into the starvation mode and starts storing calories, instead of burning them. You can't solve a slow marketing metabolism with randomly applied TV time, radio spots, social media or direct mail, even with purls or QR codes. These can all can effective when used together correctly, in the right portions and at the right time. Thoughtful planning, targeting the right message to the right person at the right time (and via the right channel) is the best fuel to keep your marketing metabolism fine tuned.