First and foremost, let me clearly state that I don’t blame clients on wanting perfection. Let me repeat that: I don’t blame clients on wanting perfection. They should want perfection. I too strive for perfection. The idea of a missing comma or the inconsistent use of punctuation in a bulleted list is enough to drive me up a wall. I hate the idea of publishing something that poorly represents myself or the Gorilla brand.
But, in today’s B2B web marketing world, if you continually focus on the micro, you’ll get buried by savvy competitors who are more focused on the macro. While you’re perfecting a blog post that was meant to be timely, your competitor will write three more that are “good enough” and will steal engagement from your potential readers. While you tweak and tweak and tweak your website before it launches, your rival will launch their site and will then be revising an improved round two version based off of real customer feedback before yours ever hits the web.
See where I’m going with this?
Just a little more than a year ago, I read Rework by the gents at 37 Signals – a really, really successful web application company based in Chicago. At Gorilla, this text has almost become holy and is one of the seminal reads for our current beliefs on best web-marketing and general business practices.
Throughout the book, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, examine a theme of going with “good enough” and an idea of creating something that can be turned into great later – that is, if it even needs to be. In one instance, they even say: “It’s OK to wing it. Just get on the plane and go. You can pick up a nicer shirt, shaving cream, and a toothbrush once you get there.”
To me, that’s a really powerful idea. I don’t know about you, but this is very relevant to projects we’ve worked on, and are currently working on, at Gorilla. I can’t tell you the number of times we’ve seen blog posts or e-newsletter blasts get knit picked to the point of irrelevance.
Don’t let this happen in your B2B marketing initiatives. Don’t get hung up on the minute details. Yes – whatever you put your name on, absolutely has to be good. But “good” can be closer to “good enough” than it is to “perfection.”
Thanks for reading my rant.