Mediocrity is not a place any of us aspire to live. However, if you relentlessly drive for perfection in every detail, you’ll end up stuck in one place. I admit it. Every time I look at any marketing execution I can see a way to change it. What I thought was a gift actually causes a lot of headaches. Until, I came across this one simple phrase that changed my entire perspective.
In the movie The Equalizer there is a line from Denzel Washington that set me free, which was about aiming for…
“Progress, not perfection.”
How much faster would we be than our competitors if this simplistic philosophy was embraced? Wouldn’t we be ahead of the game? Isn’t this in essence the point of our beloved AB testing?
Create. Launch. Test. Retool. Progress. Do it again!
For content marketing in particular, there is nowhere this rings truer. Those of us who create marketing content we are constantly looking for ways to build upon our past work in real and relevant ways. Incomplete stories have no on-going value. We must continue (or progress) the value of what we deliver. Over and over again.
In fact, many would argue that progress is the only true road to perfection. My father is a nuclear physicist, and he would cringe at the way businesses run themselves today. Mistakes are a no-no. They are bad. We fear others discovering our mistakes. People are fired for mistakes. Wow! Mistakes are considered a win in science as they eliminate options and hone focus on what works. When we fail we learn. When we apply this learning this is progress.
Create. Launch. Test. Retool. Progress. Do it again!
Processes help us focus our efforts on moving ahead. With each step comes progress. These marketing modules provide us with guardrails that allow us to move forward with more confidence and more quickly. Throughout my career, I built guidelines around successful marketing efforts to not only keep myself inline, but also to help my staff learn and stay the course. We were able to execute better and faster than the competition. What I didn’t realize was this mindset is about progress, not perfection.
AchiVi was built as the channel to share these tested marketing formulas, so that the common business owner, the overwhelmed marketing manager, and the executive striving for high standards can easily “up their game” to achieve more.
Over the next series of blogs, we will share aspects of these marketing modules that can be applied to change the way you look at the art of marketing. Here we go.
