Best practices are best practices for a reason – right?
You’ve probably heard people say the same thing about stereotypes. There may be a grain of truth behind some stereotypes, but mostly they’re just an excuse for lazy thinking.
Marketing best practices – supposedly tried and true guidelines – are the same way. Some of them are at least partly true; others are based on pure assumption or are so hypothetical as to be basically meaningless to your particular company.
Take, for example, the “best practice” that content for the internet should be brief. Many people assume that web readers don’t want to deal with long-form content, so web writers should always favor brevity over depth.
Recently, we’ve found the opposite to be true: Our longer blog posts tend to get better metrics across the board: more page views, more links, more social shares, more comments, longer time on page. These are the kind of engagement metrics we care about, so we’ve changed our internal blogging best practice from Publish quickly and often, to Publish less often if necessary in order to publish longer, more in-depth content.
John Doherty quotes a Salon writer discovering the same thing:
We’ve tried to work longer on stories for greater impact, and publish fewer quick-takes that we know you can consume elsewhere. We’re actually publishing, on average, roughly one-third fewer posts on Salon than we were a year ago ... So: 33 percent fewer posts; 40 percent greater traffic. It sounds simple, maybe obvious, but: We’ve gone back to our primary mission and have been focusing on originality. And it’s working.
Same goes for us: we’re writing fewer total posts, but meeting all our content goals, simply by bucking this content marketing“best practice.” We’ve found that, when aiming for brevity, quality and originality get sacrificed too often.
That’s one example of a marketing best practice that doesn’t work for us. Here are five more reasons to ignore “best practices” and forge your own path.
1. Best practices fall out of date.
A lot of marketing best practices are the equivalent of old wives’ tales. Even if they’ve been debunked or have fallen out of date, they keep getting repeated, over and over, taking on a life of their own. A huge body of evidence accrues, suggesting that the “best practice” is actually a worst practice, but it simply refuses to die. Every time you read a list of 10 best practices for such and such marketing tactic, you’re probably looking at several tips that are already out of date or falling out of favor fast.
For example, I heard for years that shorter subject lines perform better in email marketing. But a recent report from Adestra contradicts that supposed best practice. They found that using 90 characters or more in the subject line increased clicks and opens significantly – probably because more characters allow you to communicate more benefits. (Sounds similar to our finding about longer blog posts, doesn’t it?)
The original “best practice” about short subject lines may date back to a time when people had smaller computer screens and therefore less room in their email programs to take them in. Times change, technologies change, and “best practices” don’t always keep up with the changes. You need to be wary of received wisdom becoming entrenched without sufficient evidence. After all, this could easily swing back the other way with the rise of mobile.
2. Best practices don’t work for everyone.
Most best practices begin with an assumption: that everyone is basically the same and wants basically the same things. To an extent, this is true – I mean, people need food, water and shelter; businesses exist to make money. But (duh) it’s more complicated than that.
Every business is offering something slightly different and has slightly different goals, especially over time. A brand-new business might simply be trying to raise brand awareness and drive some traffic to their website. To meet this goal, aggressive PPC bidding on a lot of broad match terms could be beneficial.
However, in PPC, you don’t always want more clicks. You could probably raise your click-through rate on any given ad by saying that you’re giving something away for free (like “Free Shipping!”). But if people click your ad, then get to your site and find out that it’s not true, they’re not going to buy anything. For most businesses, raising clicks at the expense of conversions is a complete waste of money. What most marketers really want is to maximize clicks while also qualifying visitors so they know what they’re getting.
The point is, as a marketer or business owner, you yourself are in the best position to a) define what you want to achieve and b) understand the value of what you’re selling. Because best practices are general, they can only get you part of the way there. Before you embrace any best practice, test it on your site and with your audience. Take the best practice that mobile campaigns should have their own dedicated mobile landing pages. Jeff Allen of Hanapin Marketing found that in one mobile campaign, the desktop version of the landing page “drastically outperformed” the mobile version!
3. Best practices become clichés.
I said above that best practices are always getting repeated and passed around, even when they’re no longer true. The other problem with their prevalence in marketing culture: they become clichés. That is to say, it’s hard to stand out if you’re just following best practices.
Best practices are boring because everyone else is following them, and the goal in marketing is never to blend in. You want to stand out and be remembered. And copying what seems to be working for everyone else is not the best way to stand out.
When I first started working at WordStream, I added a ton of search marketing blogs to my Google Reader and noticed that a certain style of post was very popular, and the headlines always came in this format: “X Things You Can Learn from Y About Z.” For example, “10 Things You Can Learn About SEO from Monty Python.” I wrote about this linkbait formula over three years ago, way back in 2009.
Recently, Michael Kovis complained about the same thing in a post called “What Your ‘X Taught Me About Y’ Post Actually Taught Me”:
The idea of comparing two dissimilar concepts and fabricating similarities between each is nonsensical with a side of pointless. How is comparing a prostate exam to social media helpful to anyone? It isn’t. What does a reader actually learn from such drivel? Nothing … Simply, this style of writing has been overused.
I agree. If this style of writing corresponds to a “best practice,” it’s probably “Make it relatable with a pop culture analogy” and/or “Turn it into a list.” Of course, I’m not saying blog posts that use analogies and lists and reference Monty Python can’t succeed. I’m saying that as a marketer, you should always be wary of falling back on a cliché. Or, to quote Ezra Pound, “Make it new.” (In poetry, this quotation has certainly become a cliché, but I don’t think it’s a marketing cliché – yet!)
4. Best practices limit creativity and discovery.
Expanding on my last point: Marketing best practices get boring through familiarity. But they also actively inhibit you from making your own marketing discoveries.
To illustrate this, let me tell you about a little thing called the anchoring effect, which is a tendency to rely too heavily on an initial piece of information, or “anchor.” Here’s how it works: If someone asks you to guess how many jelly beans are in a jar, and then tells you that the last guy guessed 1,000, your guess is likely to be affected by that number – you’ll probably guess a number closer to 1,000 than if the person didn’t tell you any other guesses to start off with. The problem is, that initial guess of 1,000 may be totally wrong. You have no reason to let it affect your guess, but you just do. It’s a cognitive bias that is almost impossible to ignore.
The same goes for marketing best practices. Even if you know you’re supposed to test best practices, the tests you come up with are likely to use the best practices you’ve read and heard about as starting points. You can then get incrementally better from there, but you’ll never know where you would have ended up if you’d started from scratch with a completely new idea.
The downside here is that it’s a lot harder to start from scratch. If you start with a model you can get to “done” faster. And sometimes, yes, you have to attack the low-hanging fruit and just cross some stuff off your list. But if you’re trying to be great, you can sometimes go farther by starting without a model or “anchor,” which can place implicit limits on your creative thinking.
5. People learn by doing, not reading.
Best practice, worst practice, whatever: Nothing ever really sinks in until you do it and see the results for yourself. Blog posts (like this one!) are great for getting ideas. But at some point you need to put down the blog post and actually do something. Stop reading, start doing.
I used to write a weekly online marketing “roundup” post every Friday. I’d summarize the search marketing news that struck me as most important that week, as well as the blog posts I’d read that I thought were most insightful or helpful. These posts had a lot of benefits, including:
- We covered a lot of important and timely news
- We built relationships
- We learned which blogs and marketers and companies were creating the most interesting content
But these posts rarely did as well as I wanted them to. I chalk this up to three main problems:
- Fridays just aren’t a good traffic day for us
- Being news-focused, they didn’t always have evergreen value
- Being “roundups,” they weren’t always focused on a single topic, so they were hard to optimize for search
Eventually (I mean, like, years later) I decided that the bad outweighed the good, and I don’t write Friday roundups anymore. I’m sure one or two people miss them (aw, wipe that tear away), but now I can spend more time on posts that create more value for our company: Articles that focus on a single topic/keyword and answer a single question thoroughly. They have a longer shelf life and get far more reads over time. Despite always having a vague sense that evergreen posts are more worthwhile than news-y posts for our business, I had to learn by doing that writing an evergreen post on a Tuesday would produce better results than writing a news-related post on a Thursday afternoon. Now I’m practicing what I preach instead of just preaching it.
Marketing Best Practices Revisited
These are some of the reasons to ignore best practices. There are also plenty of reasons not to ignore them. Namely, if you literally ignore all received wisdom, you’ll waste a lot of time essentially reinventing the wheel. So don’t take this post as gospel either. Read widely, but do widely too. Make your own best practices.
This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.