Every industry has its way of doing things. So do companies and people. They develop a common language. A rubric. “We’re part of this, and we do things this way.” Sometimes this is helpful — a sort of shorthand that removes the friction of human interaction. But if you remove too much friction, you can find yourself in a rut. This is what happens when you inherit a status quo without ever giving it a second thought. You should always challenge commonly accepted ways of operating.
Too frequently, B2B marketers search for best practices, finding them on vendor blogs, white papers and other content sources they come across. Unfortunately, this indiscriminate perusal of online information almost invariably produces underwhelming results compared to those promised in the best practice. There are a few reasons for that outcome. Here are the primary ones:
‘Best practices’ is a misnomer.
The very notion of best practices assumes that many people should be doing the same thing. But if many people are doing the same thing, following the same playbook, how are you supposed to stand out? That’s a rhetorical question. You’re not. Are there tendencies and patterns? Sure. Do they vary wildly depending on context? Absolutely. Look at the data, but only as it pertains to your company’s unique circumstances.
Some might argue that this approach neglects the mountain of data that exists — data that arrives at conclusions that then become best practices. However, defaulting to “best practices” data both ignores whether some of that data is actually relevant to a specific company and assumes that the average of all that data applies to every company.
As an example, let’s say that an analysis of email marketing for B2B companies concludes that best practice is to send an email every other day. However, it is often unknown what that recommendation is based on. Is it based on data that shows that sending emails at that frequency works for every company? Or, perhaps half the companies succeeded when sending emails every other day, while the other half showed the best results by sending daily emails. In the second situation, the recommendation would be 100% wrong, since it is just an average. And “average” companies simply don’t exist.
Even if you can see some of the source data, it rarely shows how the slight deviations within the data were impacted by attributes of the companies, such as size, target audience or subindustry. And even in rare cases when that data is provided, reports don’t usually analyze whether the content in the email was relevant to the reader, was part of a larger marketing campaign, and dozens of other factors that are relevant to an email marketing campaign’s success. Marketers must continually revisit their data and challenge the insights drawn from that data.
Every company is different.
No two companies have the exact same technology, offering or personnel. The goal should always be to discover, as clearly as possible, who your target customers are. What do they want? What are they afraid of? What do they need? What are they looking for? But answering these questions with great specificity requires your company to do some soul-searching. What makes your product, service, culture or employees valuable? The better you can answer those questions, the better you’ll be able to identify and define your customers. And the better you can define your customers, the better your marketing will be.
Understand your customers’ and prospects’ user journeys. How do you reach them? What will resonate with them about your product, service or company? To use a sports analogy, it’s a game of inches. You don’t need to be or try to be the first or only to be able to carve a niche in which you can thrive. Find those inches that differentiate you from the competition.
Create your own best practice.
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all best practice, but there is a best practice for your company. You create that through a combination of publicly available, broad data and the information you painstakingly gather about your customers, as well as how you can map toward them with your marketing. Don’t ignore the broad data (it’s important to know and understand it), but let the knowledge that you build about your customers be your guiding light.
The bigger takeaway, which can be applied to every single aspect of marketing, is that you should never passively accept ideas and ways of doing things. A company’s way of doing business should be stress-tested and cross-examined, with an eye toward ascertaining whether ideas are fresh and protocols are effective.
It may be that at some point the status quo was the best way of doing things at your company. But as the old adage goes, change is the only constant. Industries change. Companies change. Technologies change. Societies change. People change. If you’re not constantly evolving, you won’t be able to separate yourself. But if you can grow intelligently, at your own pace, you will find that even the smallest of differentiators makes a big difference in the long run.
