Marketing Advice
There’s no such thing as
or clients see while you’re working on the perfect campaign? Nothing.
For new companies, they still haven’t heard of you; for existing companies, they’ve forgotten you.
perfect marketing...
In a world that’s busier than ever, repeated brand exposure is critical, especially for smaller businesses looking to create cut-through in competitive markets. At best, perfectionism slows down that process. At worst, it undermines what you manage to do by dragging out the time between campaigns so you’re starting from scratch every time.
The enemy of good
Rather than aiming for perfection, let’s do good marketing.
Describe the perfect marketing campaign. Does it last moments or months? Who should it target? Which channels? When? How? Javan Bramhall, owner of Digital Glue, explains why you should stop fretting and just get your marketing done.
W
hat makes marketing so valuable is also its biggest potential pitfall: there are
so many options.
Even with time and budget constraints, the sheer number of options can be overwhelming. How do you weigh them all up to create the perfect campaign? The short answer? You don’t.
Campaign development by numbers
The number of channels and the amount of data available to marketers has increased exponentially.
From dwell time to sentiment analysis, click-through rates to demographics, all this information creates the impression that the perfect campaign must be within touching distance. It’s given us a false impression of certainty, leading us to believe that with enough time and the right data, we can mitigate all risk, delivering the perfect campaign with a killer ROI to match. It’s a persuasive idea, particularly at a time when many of us are fi ghting budget cuts.
www.printwearandpromotion.co.uk
The opportunity cost of perfect Focusing on perfection slows us down. Too often, businesses don’t see that as a problem: slow means better, slow means quality.
There’s an opportunity cost to slow that no business can afford. While you’re spending extra time on details you think will make a difference, your competitors are already out there. They’re doing marketing – not perfect marketing – but good, or even great, marketing. They’re reaching your customers. They’re making sales. They’re building brand recognition. And – most importantly – they’re learning. They’re iterating. And that means their next campaign will be better than yours.
Perfectionism is far from harmless. It’s expensive. It’s ineffi cient. It doesn’t make good business sense.
Take an external perspective Perfectionism is inward-facing. It puts the opinions of the business fi rst. But great campaigns focus on the customer and the market. What do prospective customers
Developing a good – not perfect – campaign and getting it out the door means customers hear from you, they’re reminded of you, and they can react to the campaign you’ve put together. In return, you can learn from that response and campaign performance, getting valuable insights from real customers quicker.
This isn’t a data-hating rant. It’s the opposite. Until you get started and launch a campaign, you’re working in the realms of the theoretical: we think it’ll deliver this, we think this message will land, we think these are the right channels for us. Once a campaign is live, you move from the theoretical to real insights from real customers. That’s a truly data-driven approach.
Going round in circles
Perfectionism encourages us to think of marketing as linear: idea, development, launch, done. That’s not how great work is created.
They say it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert, and something similar is true of marketing. Campaigns aren’t tasks to complete – they’re ideas put into practice again and again so we can learn and improve over time.
Do it, review it, improve it. Repeat. And then do it all again.
Ironically, when we stop aiming for perfection and focus on doing and learning, we have the opportunity to fi gure out what a great marketing campaign looks like for our business. Invest time in iteration, not perfectionism. Get marketing done.
May 2023 | 77 |
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