Best Practices Produce Mediocre Results

What are the best practices in Search Marketing?  How about Social Media Marketing?  Every day, it seems our inboxes, conference agendas and RSS reader is filled with “lessons learned” and new “best practices” that we can employ in our marketing strategies.

We follow “best practices” because they’re safe.  These are maps for us to follow to get the same results as those that went before us.  In short, they are the marketing equivalent of sitting down at the restaurant and saying “I’ll have what she’s having”.

But, here’s the thing – when we are satisfied with a best practice – when we end at best practices; we are saying that we’re satisfied with being average.

You’ve all heard them. Here’s a few “best practices” that we’ve grown up with:

• There’s the 40/40/20 rule for direct marketing success
  Which, started by Ed Mayer, a pioneer in the direct marketing industry says we should focus 80% of our effort on the right audience and the right offer – and 20% on the creative, and execution.  It got its name from Mayer’s rule of focusing 40%  to the right list (audience), 40% to the offer and 20% to everything else (format, paper, stock graphics etc..).
• Remove the navigation from your landing page
  This “best practice” says that you should remove everything extraneous from your PPC landing pages or you’ll risk your conversion rate.
• The 1% to 2% Conversion Rate
  This one is so ingrained that it’s even become a “rule” within Google Adwords. If you can’t maintain a higher than 1%  “best practice” click-thru-rate on your text ad, your Ad Quality Score is penalized.

And there are tons of others…

And my point is not to disabuse you of these practices (although I have personal experience that the second one above is not always true).  In fact quite the opposite – they are best practices precisely because they have worked for many in the past.

Do You Want To Be The Chicken Or Egg?

Who was the first marketer to discover that removing 75% of her email list; and culling it to just those who “opted-in” actually improved her marketing performance and saved money?

Almost certainly this wasn’t a best practice when she tried it.  She either discovered it accidentally (happy accident) or there was a decision to test this as a theory and the marketer tried it out.  Then, a case study gets written – it gets passed on, and passed on – and ultimately becomes the rule of thumb for marketing best practice from that point forward.  Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Basically – if you’re in the business of using “best practices” as the source of your entire marketing strategy, you can count on having just as tasty a lunch as your neighbor – or being just good as your competition – but no better.

Fail Spectacularly to Succeed Wildly

I’ve been working with a product company recently that is in major need of a complete marketing strategy overhaul.  After more than a decade in business, they find themselves in the wagon wheel business instead of the transportation business.

They have money – and they have sales.  They have an extraordinarily smart product development and marketing team.

But there’s simply no appetite for coloring outside the lines.

In another, much more limited case, I’ve seen organizations where the sales and marketing team profess to have a marketing philosophy “focused on bold experimentation” and the reality couldn’t be further from that.   They may try one incremental change; maybe changing the hero image from a man to a woman – and test it for a week – and when they get no exponential lift, they quickly go back to the first image.  Or, maybe they’ll try something “really radical” like A/B Testing whether a product price that’s twice as much will produce more sales.  Except they’ll try it on their poorest performing keyword buy.

By the way, if you want to watch sales guys hyperventilate, try suggesting a test to double the price as an experiment – you’ll be lucky to keep your head.

We Need To Blow Some Shit Up

The common thread across these examples is a fear of failure in the short term for the learning  (or breakthrough practice) we might achieve in the longer term.   In short, we’re sometimes so afraid that we might “lose sales” or “disenfranchise a prospect” that our practices stay safe, incremental – and ultimately mediocre.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you need to completely upend your entire marketing strategy – but if you truly want to employ a philosophy of experimentation and breakthrough practices, you’ve got to try some radical ones from time to time.   Here are some questions to get you started:

Take your worst performing tactic (maybe it’s print or events) and ask yourself – if tomorrow this tactic was the only thing you could do to market your product – how would you do it?

Take your best performing tactic (maybe it’s PPC) and ask yourself – if tomorrow we learned that, compared to of all our competitors, we were dead last in performance in this tactic.  What would we do differently to change that?  Now, do it for all your tactics.

Pretend for a moment that your target customer’s industry bubble just burst (Newspapers for example) how (or if) would your solution need to change to fundamentally change another industry’s economics.  Would addressing it now give you a competitive advantage?

And I’m sure you can dream up others.

What you’ll hopefully end up with is a whole bunch of big, scary marketing ideas – and some of them are worth experimenting with.  For example, if you’ve got a landing page that’s converting prospects at a “healthy best practice” 2%  - why not try an experiment where you completely change the design.    Or, what about launching a whole new micro-site that approaches your product in a whole new way.  You may fail spectacularly.  Or, you may just create a breakthrough practice.

Or, what about giving your consultant a small “skunk-works” budget – and the whole point is to try radical experiments to blow stuff up.  The learning that you’ll get in the short-term will be incredibly valuable for your long term efforts.

Peter Drucker said that business “only has two functions: marketing and innovation.  Marketing and innovation create value, all the rest are costs.”

Marketing success may come from following best practices – but (to quote Albert Einstein) “try not to become a man of success, but rather a man of value.”

Photo credit:  LabyrinthX