Doing it wrong

If you work in digital, you’re probably doing it wrong.

To start, your website isn’t responsive enough. Your privacy policy is outdated, your automated marketing should be better, your SEO need to be optimised, you’re not remarketing as good as you should, and you’re certainly not doing enough with big data.

Your twitter feed isn’t as good as Slack’s, your release notes aren’t as fun as Trello’s, your design sprints should be more like Google’s, and you could learn a lot about referrals from Airbnb. You should round down like Uber, upsell like Amazon, content market like KissMetrics, and test headlines like BuzzFeed.

Your tone should be more conversational, your design simpler, and your website should be more accessible (seriously, it should).

It’s easy to spot the problems.

Especially for those of us who work in tech, every post, email, and new feature is inherently a public thing. Throughout my working career, I’ve spent more nights than I’d care to admit, lying awake, worrying about what I might be doing wrong. Negative energy that would have be better spent on… well… pretty much anything else.

The only way not to do something wrong—and avoid criticism—is to do nothing. And that’s much, much worse.

So don’t do that.

Don’t let criticism, trolls, or fear of “doing it wrong” keep you from shipping.

“Fear kills more dreams than failure ever will”

Working closely with software developers, it’s clear they’ve figured something out that the rest of us marketing people haven’t fully cottoned on to yet: You have limited time. Accept that you will never get all the things done AND do all the things perfectly.

So?

Try not to become overwhelmed with a list of possibilities. Be brutal with prioritisation. Focus on the things that actually matter, execute, and keep learning.

Above all, don’t allow the fear of doing it wrong stop you. “Doing it wrong” is infinitely better than not doing anything.

Further reading:
Being in Motion vs Taking Action
Ira Glass on the Secret of Creative Success

Image by Jack Butcher, Shoot