Aiming for marketing quality, not perfection

Sometimes when we tackle marketing tasks we are tempted to believe that only excellence is good enough. We set very high standards and very demanding goa

That’s fine. Achieving great things never happens unless we set challenging targets. But sometimes high standards end up causing lengthy delays – or even mean that nothing ever gets implemented.

Take websites for example. I know of a business where the marketing team (and everyone else) have been aware that they need a new website for over a year. They know that their existing site is out-of-date, lacks essential content and contains numerous errors.

So they decided they need a new site and came up with a bunch of great ideas for it. The trouble is, there are so many ideas, and they are so difficult and expensive to put into action, that all of them are just that – still ideas and nothing else.

In the meantime, every time they attract visitors to their existing site they run the risk of actually putting people off doing business with them. Even worse, they are investing thousands of pounds each year generating traffic to their site – even though they know the site is no longer suitable.

Think about it this way. If you walked into a shop with out-of-date products and prices (or even no prices) and a confusing layout, would you do business with them?

In fact, I know of several businesses in just this situation. They could all have created a simple website in a few days or weeks. It may have been smaller than the one in their head. It may have lacked the bells and whistles. But it would have been a live, accurate, up-to-date site – and it would have been much better than the current one they seem unwilling to ditch.

In a perfect world, every website project would go smoothly and deliver a great site. But we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in a world of limited time and limited budgets.

It’s also thankfully a world where a great number of our competitors are also making do with a site they would rather see the back of. They are also finding it hard to create their ‘perfect’ site. So often you don’t have to have a great site to be better than your competitors – just one that is accurate and easy to use.

Take a look at your main competitors’ websites and ask yourself what it would take to do better. If the answer is ‘less effort than I thought’ then why not go ahead and get your less-than-perfect website online, but with a sensible schedule for adding additional content to get close to the perfect site you really want?

My experience on most marketing campaigns has been that I would have liked better materials, a better distribution list, more time to implement it and so on. But despite these flaws most campaigns have been profitable.

Remembering that track record of good results from less-than-perfect activity is sometimes needed to turn our great ideas into realistic, achievable activities.