How to find and break the marketing rules that hold you back
If you could get away with breaking one marketing rule, what would you choose? What deeply ingrained, widely accepted “best practice” holds you back? Makes you love your job less?
Today I’m sharing a simple process for liberating yourself from the most restrictive, time-consuming, and utterly useless “rules” in marketing.
Step 1: Find an expensive rule
You feel the costs of following a rule like this — time, frustration, money, etc. — but you’re not sure about the benefit.
You’ve heard that blog posts should be 700 words, right? This little nugget wormed its way into my brain early in my career, mocking my preference for brevity. Let’s interrogate it.
Step 2: Quantify the costs
What does it cost you to follow the rule?
If I’m writing three 700-word blog posts a week (I am not, this is hypothetical), and each takes me 4 hours, this rule costs me 12 hours a week. That’s a big time-suck!
And let’s not forget #selfcare. Following this rule adds 20% stress to my job. Who needs that?
Write down as many costs as you can think of.
Step 3: Confront the downside
What bad things could happen if you ignore the rule? In our hypothetical, writing shorter pieces might…
- Reduce time-on-page
- Trigger unsubscribes and/or dampen new subscriber growth
- Discourage social sharing
As soon as you list the risks, rank them from most harmful to least harmful, then take out the risks that don’t actually scare you. If you care about audience growth, but time-on-page isn’t an important metric to you, you’d end up here:
- Trigger unsubscribes and/or dampen new subscriber growth
- Discourage social sharing
Now we have two risks we can plug into our cost/benefit framework.
Step 4: Plan your deviation
How might you break the rule and what would you gain?
Let’s cut 700 words in half. If I write three 350-word posts per week, I’ll claw back 6 hours a week, and reduce my stress by double digits. That’s my upside.
Step 5: Evaluate and begin
Is the reward worth the risk? If you’re sure it isn’t, or the risk is immediate and irreversible, find another rule to break.
But in our scenario? We’ve struck gold. The upside — 6 hours back! — is substantial, immediate, and likely. We can monitor subscriber growth and social sharing. Neither risk will materialize over night, and both are reversible. If and when the costs actually outweigh the benefit, we’ll simply go back to 700 words.
If you try this exercise, please let me know how it goes. It feels great to break bullshit rules, especially when your competitors keep following them.
By the way, this post is 439 words. Deal with it, establishment!
