Why best practices don't work for marketing
On the futility of applying marketing playbooks from other verticals and models
Every marketer worth their salt hates the term. They won’t tell you, but they do. Maybe it’s because they are confronted with it so often. Maybe it’s because they know it’s pointless and still have to deal with it.
But mostly because it doesn’t help us do better marketing.
Best practices are nonsense.
It comes up often, especially at early stage startups. What are the best practices for this, someone might ask. How did Stripe do this, can we see how the top startups went about this, can we see a deck and then make a decision - these questions might be next.
Our shoulders drop, our enthusiasm dips. We nod, do the research, and make the presentation, knowing fully well it’s useless.
Why do we know that it won’t help us?
Because Stripe is a fintech company. We may or may not be one. Stripe had the advantage of being visible and being located in the valley. We may or not have that. Stripe had the backing of some of the world’s most aggressive VCs. We may or may not.
If we are exactly like them, then great, we can probably apply some of the best practices from Stripe’s playbook. If not, and we are probably not, then how can we assume that what worked for Stripe in that time, in that context, will work for us too? It’s madness.
Every startup’s target audience is different, the decision makers are different, the influencers are different, the personas are different. And yet the sceptre of 'best practices' pops up, encouraging copying strategies and tactics from other startups that simply don’t translate. It kills any kind of marketing innovation or first-principles thinking. Also, the marketing landscape shifts dramatically and quickly for startups: What worked 5 years ago is guaranteed not to work today.
If you think only early stage startups suffer from this love for some kind of playbook, you are mistaken. I’ve seen smart founders of successful startups, absolute stars in their domains, fall for this too. Only that in larger startups, what results is even worse. Failures cost more money, and teams that have gone in one direction take a long time to be steered back to meaningful output.
Why does this happen?
One reason for this is of course, a problem I have pointed out several times before: Founders mostly tend to be engineers and they look at marketing as an engineering problem. If you do these 3 things, business will grow - is the assumption. Unfortunately, those days are over. Marketing simply doesn’t work like that anymore. If you don’t have a marketer in your founding team and are not thinking about acquisition from the ideation stage, you are immediately crippled. You will lose against the team that builds distribution early or into the product.
We marketers are to blame too. The other reason, and we marketers don’t talk about this enough - is that we are not vocal and assertive in our roles. If we know that something won’t work, and believe me, we do, why don’t we say it out loud? I’ve been guilty of this. I have preferred to defer to the HIPPO - the highest paid person’s opinion - rather than confronting and addressing what I know well to be futile. Sure, it’s not fun to be that person, but that’s what we are paid for.
How do we avoid this?
First, by getting our marketing basics right. Here’s one of the first essays I wrote for this newsletter, on the marketing MVP, that helps you address this.
Second, by figuring out what story you are telling as a founder and as a company, and putting it at the centre of your marketing efforts.
Third, by nailing your positioning, which is the basis of your marketing strategy. If you don’t nail what you are and who you are for, there’s no point spending money on marketing. Here’s how to do this.
Fourth, build a marketing engine. If you are able to do this even before you have a product, even better. Here’s how Rocketlane did it, it’ll help you plan this out for yourself.
And finally, put together a great marketing team. Here’s a short guide to getting a brilliant group of people together, written for founders.
Does going through all this guarantee that the ghost of best practices won’t rear its head at some point? No. But you will definitely avoid boring, unimaginative, we-did-this-too marketing, which is the recipe for failure.
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