Today, I’m sharing the article from our February email newsletter. If you’d like to subscribe to our monthly newsletter, please use the simple form at the bottom of this page. Your email address is all we ask for and return you’ll receive untold riches. (In the form of really great digital marketing insights each month.)
Best practices may be a trap.
Forge your own path and you may find greater marketing success and more satisfaction in your work.
We all strive to be the best. But the best what, exactly?
I’ve been reading quite a bit lately about benchmarking and best practices in a number of areas of marketing and web development. (Particularly ADA compliance – you’ll be hearing more from us on that topic soon!)
And while we should all have goals for ourselves and our marketing efforts, I’m struck by how often benchmarking and best practices become a crutch. They become less something to strive for and more a safe choice. Safe as in, “They can’t fire me if I’m doing what everyone else is doing, right?”
So maybe we’d all be better off forgetting the benchmarks and aim instead to forge our own paths to marketing greatness. Certainly, we should pay attention to anything effective that others are doing and adapt their tactics to our own needs. But aiming for someone else’s definition of “best” might not be best for you.
Even better might be creating a system that aims for continuous incremental improvement rather than some mythical “best.” Chances are you’ll find greater success and feel more inspired, to boot.
