There are many effective ways of reaching out to your audience. While it may seem like a good idea to try each one and beat your competitors to it, it might be a good idea to avoid the trend chasing. In other words, just because something DOES work, DOESN’T mean you should be doing it.

 Search engine optimization (SEO), social media campaigns, pay-per-click, retargeting ads, mobile marketing — all of these things can be effective, but you have to be smart about how you approach them. Here’s how you can do it.

 Firstly, focus on one thing.

 You may think you’re good at multitasking, but study after study proves that you’re wrong. What you’re actually “good at” is switch-tasking, or shifting quickly between one thing at a time.

 In other words, as long as your focus remains on the one item of business — for one second or one hour — you’ll be at your best. The moment you start adding other things to the mix, is the moment you have to start dividing that focus, and performance suffers.

 Therefore, pick a business strategy and follow it through until you start seeing results before you think of adding something else.

 Secondly, systemize it.

 Make sure your strategy is operational before implementing something else. That means there has to be a strong degree of passivity that separates its functionality from your time.

 That is to say, you need to get to a point where you don’t have to be “present” at all times for something to work.

 The problem is that business owners either try to take on too much at one time, or they hire the wrong people to implement every strategy at once, thus overextending themselves before they see any results.

 That over-anxiousness can dig a hole that is almost too deep to escape.

 Thirdly, improve what you have before adding something new.

 The last big mistake that business owners/marketers make with trend chasing is that they don’t wait to see if their results are replicable with one particular strategy before implementing the next.

Their heart is in the right place by waiting to see those first signs of life out of a strategy, but they read early results as normal results instead of testing some more.

 What business strategies are you thinking of implementing in the coming months? Do you have the patience to see it through?

 Angelo Lombardo is a Senior Executive at Coca-Cola and a faculty member at HTA.  He teaches a semi monthly webinar to elite members  available on HTA TV.