Yesterday, I talked about standards.
As a marketing advisor, I can help my clients ship work at any level of “perfection”. I’m agnostic about which path we take and my fees/effort don’t change whether we do 80% quality or 20%.
What changes is how long we take to perfect things, which impacts results. Highly polished work takes time, which has a cost.
That’s why my general tendency to help clients ship their marketing efforts at 80% perfect in order to get results within a reasonable timeframe.
That doesn’t mean shipping typos or errors—that’s not allowable. It means doing the best you can within a reasonable time and budget.
From my experience, those who tend to aim for near-perfection end up moving too slowly. They over analyze to the point where it has negative effects on the one thing they’re looking for—results.
Usually, those clients are experiencing some form of fear—whether it’s fear of not knowing what they’re doing, not wanting to look bad, or not wanting to do mess something up.
It’s my job to help them overcome that fear and push forward.
If you’re already doing the fundamentals well at 80%, it’s probably time to elevate the standards across the board. I call this the Optimization Phase of our engagements.
But until then, unless there’s a strong strategic reason to only ship near-perfect work and you have the time and budget to take as long as it takes, ship the best work you can.
You can ship a 90% perfect website, a 70% perfect social media effort, an 80% perfect ad campaign—whatever you can muster as long as you’re moving and not spending too long on the polish and you’re getting results.
Then, once you’re seeing the lions share of results, you can go back to optimize and make everything even better.
Otherwise, you’ll move too slowly to get meaningful results—most of the time.