It’s easy to want to make sure that every marketing strategy you do is shiny and perfect from the start. I mean why even bother doing anything if you’re not going to do it right the first time, right? Let’s discuss why this isn’t always the best method.
For me, this one hits hard. As a perfectionist, I struggle with starting anything that I know I won’t be able to finish perfectly. But with marketing things are rarely (if ever!) so perfect at implementation that they never need to be updated or tweaked.
A large part of marketing is analyzing the data from your strategies:
- For social media, this can come in the form of number of views/impressions, number of likes, number of comments, total amount of time your videos were watched, when people stopped watching your videos, etc.
- For your websites, this can be number of page views, number of unique visitors, average session length, bounce rate, conversion rate, traffic sources, etc.
- For your business in general, comparing the total number of sales during specific time ranges, return on investment, lead generation, retention and churn rate, etc.
I could go on and on about the different types of data that marketers collect, but the point I’m making today is that without actually implementing that marketing strategy you’ve been working on, you won’t have any data to collect.
I read somewhere once (wish I could remember exactly where) that “anything worth doing, is worth doing poorly.” The idea here is that anything that’s worth getting done, is worth doing even if it’s not perfect. Don’t have time to brush your teeth for the recommended 2 minutes? Brushing for 30 seconds is better than not brushing at all. Can’t make yourself a 5-star breakfast every morning? Grabbing a quick breakfast burrito is better than starving yourself.
This same thought process applies to marketing too. A quick unedited reel about what goes on behind the scenes in your business is better than spending so long trying to make a perfect reel that it never gets done. 10 daily thrown together image posts are better than 1 perfect image that takes you two weeks to finish. A website with short descriptions for your products with quick links to purchase them that goes up tomorrow is better than waiting 3 months while you write the perfect sales copy for a landing page for each one.
Now, I’m not saying never write those awesome landing pages, just that getting something workable up now while you’re writing is better than having nothing at all. Marketing is all about adapting what you’re doing to make it better. You can make things perfect as you go, but you can’t do this if you don’t even have a starting point yet. Perfection takes time and you can always be working towards it, but don’t let a fear of failing stop you from doing anything at all.
So stop worrying so much about getting it exactly right the first time. Just get something solid done and out in the world so that you can analyze what parts of it work well and what needs to be done better. Then you’ll be able to fix things as you go until you’ve got an absolute masterpiece.
All the best,
Ryanne Zender
Disclaimer: While marketing is based in part on statistics and psychology, it is not an exact science. Every business and market are unique. What may work for one business, will not necessarily work for another. There are no guarantees in marketing, and this post is for informational and educational purposes only and does not replace professional advice. You can check out the full list of disclaimers and disclosures here.
