When Good Enough is Good Enough

Many business owners are perfectionists. This makes a lot of sense. To be successful, you need to be dedicated to learning and honing your craft. You need to pay attention to detail – whether it is in product design or in tracking your budget. Many of these areas are imperative to ensure safe products and reliable services. However, what happens when the perfectionism crosses into your marketing efforts? When does it become “analysis paralysis”? And equally important, when do you need to take that extra minute?

Without a specific end goal, testing and learning can be an infinite process

Ask any good strategic marketer if they believe in testing and they’ll say yes. To optimize your marketing whether it is an email subject line, time of day of a social media post, or a sale offer, you can create an A/B test. Simply put, you test version A versus version B of the tactic with one variable. The winner becomes your “champion” for your next test. After introducing a new challenger, the process begins again. If you don’t have a predetermined success metric – e.g., open rate of 30%, 10% lift in engagement, etc. then this cycle can be never ending. At some point, the improvement will not justify the efforts. That’s when good enough is good enough.

Proofreading is a forgotten science

In the time of immediate publishing and the race to be the first to share, we seem to have forgotten about how to reread what we write. On the reader side, we also have become accepting of typos and incomplete thoughts. It’s the Twitter brain. However, just because readers are less judgmental, it does not mean you shouldn’t proofread your content – both copy and text on images. Read about why anything you share should also pass the nanosecond test. This one task that I think good enough is not good enough – there is no reason for typos or misspellings. And remember, if you proofread and autocorrected in your own brain, then most platforms allow for editing after publishing. If not, then consider deleting and reposting if you won’t lose engagement.

Tips for Proofreading

• Read it out loud. This slows down the process of reading back your copy.
• Spellcheck! You can always copy and paste text into a program like Word if the platform you’re using doesn’t have the ability.
• Prefill information like hashtags or mentioning other accounts. Oftentimes posting or tweeting live can feel overwhelming, but if you’ve already started a draft with these items, then all you need to add is the insight you want to share.