Stop overthinking your digital marketing

I had a great time speaking with the New Jersey Advertising Club yesterday. Lots of marketers full of good questions, especially questions about how to take their experience and use it in the brave new digital world. But after talking to a few people after the event, I was struck by how one of the big problems marketers have is that we are too smart for our own good, and we believe that we can think our way out of every dilemma. We can’t, and it is time that we stopped trying to.

We’re overthinking everything. Our marketing history says that advertising is risky, new campaigns are fraught with peril, and people get fired for mistakes. Unfortunately our history is not helping us in our present, where we need to try things out and experiment.

This is not an excuse for making big mistakes. Instead, it is the realization that only by trying things do we really learn what markets want. Only that way will we test whether our big well-thought-out ideas resonate with our audience.

Stop trying to anticipate everything your customer wants. Instead, just try something small–new ad copy, a new offer, a new marketing tactic–and see what happens. Don’t spend a lot of time or money at it. Don’t do it on a large scale. Don’t do it in a big way. Just try something small that no one will notice if it flops.

If it works, even a little bit, then change it to see if it can work even better. If it doesn’t work at all, then drop it for some other small idea.

Eventually, your customers will tell you what works and what doesn’t. And you can start thinking of the next thing to try instead of thinking of all the ways it could go wrong so that you can prevent any whiff of failure. Because overthinking it paralyzes action. It feels safe, but it is actually the most dangerous approach of all.