Hello there marketer, you feeling OK?
Little stressed? Feeling messed up? Things not working out the way you planned?
It’s okay. “They” say 90% of what you worry about never happens. Or you’re looking for serious advice not based on fake statistics from a humor website?
One thing for sure is that you’re totally messed up!
So let’s see…
Contacting your entire unsubscribe list? Over budget? Unforgiving competition on social media? Well it’s true! But a lot of the things that marketers waste time doing, and lose sleep over, are things we could totally chill out on. Here’s a 10 list that can help you identify some.
- Typos in your company’s Blog Posts: Don’t impact meaning or clarity, don’t worry about it. Try to prevent them, fix them when you find ones that slip through, and carry on with your life. In fact, just to show you that it’s not the end of the world, I’m going to add a typo in in this post. See? Everything’s still fine.
- Your Email Workflows: Workflows are great because they help you efficiently segment your lists and target your email content. But many marketers get too fancy with their workflow logic, and their workflows end up looking a little something like this:
We set up more and more workflows and after they run for several months, realize we wasted hours thinking through that logic only to solve for .0007% of our database. Your brainpower and time can be used better elsewhere. Keep the workflows simple.
- Titles: As in the subject lines of your emails. It is fine to spend some time thinking of a compelling title. Or tweaking your email subject lines to make them more click-worthy. Once you’ve spent a few minutes making something both catchy, accurate, and SEO friendly, it’s time to stop digging for better options. Readers will not be thinking about your word choice to that level, and your brain can be used for bigger and better things.
- Comments: Nobody commented on your blog post or on your latest marketing campaign! So what? … When you get wonderful, insightful comments, it’s definitely a bonus. But it doesn’t mean your content isn’t good, valuable, or even downright genius. It just means that post didn’t … incite comments. If people are reading it, linking to it, and sharing it on social media, don’t sweat it if no one comments.
- Clickthrough Rate Benchmarks: Looking at clickthrough rate is important. No question. But how you relate to other companies, and even data from within your own website, is impacted by so many variables that the benchmarks are rendered completely useless. It depends on how much traffic you’re getting, what the call-to-action is, where on the site you are … there are just too many variables to make a vague benchmark useful. Unless you find a similar proxy for the exact scenario you’re trying to assess. Stop comparing yourself to others and focus on improving your own specific clickthrough metrics month over month.
- Blogging: Blogging hasn’t been around for that long. And business blogging has been around for even less time than traditional “blogging.” The people that are saying they’re doing business blogging are people that are willing to just start writing something. There’s no secret, no special talent that you don’t possess because you’re some “other kind” of marketer. It’s just typing words, like you do when you write copy, when you put email campaigns together, when you update your website. Focus on the fact that you’re smart, you have something to teach people, and you know about your industry
- Sounding Smart: Stop worrying about sounding smart in your marketing content. Focus on being smart and sounding like a person. People like people.
- The Perfect Design: Amazing design is great! But it’s not the be-all-end-all of your marketing, either. Function is more important than hot design. If your less-than-perfect design isn’t making your users’ experiences worse or more confusing, don’t worry.
- Failure: Failure is fine. It means you did something. But if you’re trying something new and it flops, pick yourself up, pat yourself on the back for thinking of a new way to move your metrics, and move on.
*The above article was inspired by Hubspot for marketers