Stop the Spiral: How to Turn Diminishing Returns into Accelerating Success

Posted June 24, 2025

In All

You don’t need to be Einstein to understand this simple concept: if you keep doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results, you’re simply not going to get anywhere. Yet, this is exactly what happens in rural marketing when businesses fail to step back, reflect, and adjust their approach. The result? A downward spiral where mistakes are compounded, resources are drained, and the impact of your efforts shrinks.

But there’s a brighter side: the law of accelerating returns. This is the concept that when you make good decisions, take the right actions, and focus on refining your efforts, you get an upward spiral. The more effort you apply, the more rewards you reap. It’s a feedback loop that works in your favor, if you’re willing to use it.

The Feedback Loop: Don’t Ignore the Evidence

If things aren’t working, it’s time to stop and reflect. Don’t ignore the evidence of failure, and don’t start criticizing or judging your situation. Instead, get curious. Ask yourself:

Why are these things not working for me?
Who is someone independent and objective who might see what I can’t?
What should I stop doing, and what should I start doing?
What are others doing that I’m not?
Can I spot a pattern or strategy they’re using that I could adopt?

The key here is to remain open-minded and adapt. Take action, test new ideas, and be willing to discard what isn’t producing results.

Accelerating Returns: Applying Force to Your Marketing

Let’s borrow a little from Newton’s Second Law of Motion: Force equals mass times acceleration. In simple terms, if you apply more force to an object, it will accelerate faster. The same applies to your marketing efforts. The more force, focus, and attention you put into your rural marketing, the faster and further it will go.

So, here’s the big question for you: What force are you applying to your marketing?

How much time and energy are you truly committing to your marketing and sales?
How are you measuring and tracking the effectiveness of your efforts?
What kind of feedback loops do you have in place to improve your approach?
How much of your marketing are you actively testing? Are you running A/B tests, testing new headlines, offers, calls to action, and personalization?

Here’s the rule of thumb I tell rural business owners: At least 30% of your time and activity should be dedicated to marketing. Any less, and you’ll start to see diminishing returns.

When it comes to budgeting, a good benchmark is to invest 5-10% of your gross revenue into marketing. Research from global company Gartner shows that marketing budgets typically make up about 11.2% of a company’s total revenue. So if you’re investing less than 5%, you’re underfunding your marketing—and that’s only going to make your job harder in the long run.

Think of it this way: It’s a false economy to shortcut your marketing. Just like your house, car, or teeth, if you neglect marketing, it’ll cost you more to fix later. Weeds in your garden won’t go away on their own. Prevention is always better than cure.

But My Marketing Isn’t Working!

I get it. You’ve tried certain marketing tactics, and they’ve let you down. But here’s the thing—if it’s not working, it’s not working. Don’t keep pushing the same strategy if it’s clearly failing. Just like “hire slowly, fire quickly,” if something in your marketing isn’t working, stop it before it bleeds your resources dry.

If you’ve got the right metrics in place, you’ll know for sure whether it’s time to stop. Measuring is key. We’ve never had trouble convincing rural business owners to spend more on their marketing once they see it’s working. Whether it’s sales training, outbound educational content, email automation, lead magnets, or organic SEO—these strategies work, and they’ve been proven time and time again.

When we inherit a rural business that’s been burned by bad marketing advice (social media, anyone?), it’s always a challenge. But the key to success is killing what’s not working quickly—before it drains your budget.

Test, Fail Fast, and Scale: The Jim Collins Method

If you’re stuck in a rut, it’s time to get out. You don’t need to bet everything on one big marketing campaign. Instead, fire bullets instead of cannonballs, as Jim Collins advises in Good to Great. The idea is to take small, calculated risks. Run tests. Try things on a small scale first, in a specific rural region or district. If it works, then scale up.

We often deploy district and driveway strategies with clients—starting with a small pilot test to see what resonates before rolling out on a larger scale. You don’t have to throw everything into a huge campaign at once. The goal is to minimize risk and maximize your chances of success.

The Law of Accelerating Returns: A Game Changer

You want the law of accelerating returns to work in your favor, not the law of diminishing returns. This means consistently applying effort, testing, learning, and improving. It’s a process that takes time. And yes, it requires a lot of testing and fine-tuning.

But the good news? With the right guidance, you can get results 10x faster than trying to guess your way through. Someone else has already cracked the code—they’ve gone before you and learned the hard lessons. Now it’s time for you to learn from them.

When you ask the right questions, make the right adjustments, and push yourself out of your comfort zone, accelerating returns will dominate your marketing strategy. The key is to stop guessing and start applying proven methods that work.