If you’ve been listening to me at all lately, you’ll have heard me say that when it comes to marketing, your rallying cry is:
Not perfect, but done.
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It’s better to have a website that is not perfect, but is finished and launched and shared with the world, than a perfect website which never goes anywhere.
But ‘perfect but done’ is a difficult cry to rally round – not just for accountants, but all of us business owners. And for your clients. Because we all agree that the perfect website doesn’t exist, but we have reputations to uphold. A good impression to give. A professional image to share.
So if you’re resistant to the ‘not perfect but done’ concept (which I still stand by), I present to you another angle on the same approach:
Not perfect, but good.
This means that you accept the fact that absolute perfection is impossible (in this world anyway), but this marketing item you’ve created is good. It gets the point across, it has the key message, there’s a call to action, the design is clear, it matches your branding.
It means that you don’t panic if a word is misspelled. Naturally you want to do everything possible to have an excellent ebook – but I’ve seen massive organisations like Hubspot or Hinge make spelling mistakes in blogs or ebooks. Maybe one, here or there.
And all that does is encourage me that they’re not perfect, either – but their work is still good. Their research is good. The design, layout, content, and message is good.
So if you’re building a website and it doesn’t have all the pages you want, and some of them are more simplistic than you’d like, and that stock image you chose could use just a little bit of tweaking, you can still launch it if it has the right messages and a clear call to action. And it works. When someone clicks on the contact form, they can fill it in and send it, and the message arrives to you.
That’s good.
Not perfect, but good.
So to get to ‘good’ status on whatever marketing you’re trying to do right now, here are a few of my tips as you evaluate it. Ask yourself:
- Is there one clear message? You can have a lot of content, but stay on point. Having twenty different inter-related points could seem clever, but just confuse the issue – and confusion is not good.
- Is there one clear call to action? What do you want them to do, and can they quickly figure out how to do it?
- Does it work? If it’s an app, and the idea is that they download it and access an in-app checklist, but the app doesn’t download properly from the App store, that’s not good.
- Is the design good? The key with design is not that it follows a prescribed path of any kind, but that it fits with your style and image.
- Is it a fit with your brand? Beyond just your style and personality as a firm, are the colours right? The fonts, the sizes, the imagery? Conflicting design can cause people to give up on your marketing item.
- Is it consistent? If your web page has four different types of fonts, two stock images, an illustrated graphic, and embedded code from some other system, the eye gets confused, and people might give up on trying to figure out what it means.
- Does it read or display well? For the most part, can you flick through it without any glaring errors, and does the whole thing fit together well?
- Do you like it? Not every marketing idea is a fit for all businesses – or for all accountants. You need to like it – or at least be willing to try it. (Note: For many marketing ideas, just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it’s bad. It may just mean you’re not comfortable with it yet.)
- Do your clients like it? This is even more important. No matter how much the rest of the world promotes pre-recorded webinars, if you have tried it and it isn’t a fit with your clients and prospects, that’s not good. However, please remember that you cannot, ever, please all the people. It’s difficult enough pleasing the majority. If one or two clients aren’t too thrilled, don’t panic. Keep getting feedback. Listen to your best, most profitable, favourite clients – as a group.
Have a (not perfect, but) good Friday!