Screw "Good to Great"

--> nowt to half decent is where it's at

Hiya - it’s been a while! I think I may have eased into retirement without noticing…

“Good to Great” is brilliant marketing.

Telling someone they’re rubbish and need to improve tends to trigger defensiveness. Telling them they’re good but there are a few things they need to do if they want to be great tends to go down a bit better.

But I have to tell you that the biggest impacts and the biggest financial gains I’ve seen in most everything to do with marketing don’t come from going from good to great.

They don’t even come from going from bad to good.

They come from going from doing nothing to doing something half decent.

Most of the advice you’ll read about marketing is of the “good to great” variety.

It’s sexier. It’s more fun for experts to write and they get to flex their expertise and position themselves in the go-to bucket.

And it’s more fun to read too because it’s often new and clever information. Or if you already know it you can nod and get a self-satisfied glow that you’re up on the latest trends.

But in truth, there are exponentially more people out there who know about good marketing than there are actually doing it.

And I think to a large degree, constantly talking about great marketing actually puts people off doing it because it seems too difficult.

You’ve probably heard a lot of email experts, for example, bang on about how you should be emailing daily. About how it unequivocably gets better results and blah blah blah.

And while that all might be true, it’s just not realistic for most people.

So they end up doing nothing.

And I can promise you, the leap from sending no emails at all to sending one a month or one a week gives you much bigger jump in performance than going from weekly to daily.

And it’s doable.

Same goes for almost any marketing you might be thinking of. Nothing to half-decent is the big win.

Next time you find yourself holding back from something in your marketing because it seems to hard or too time-consuming, ask yourself whether you’re focusing too much on the great version when a half-decent version will work fine.

You can always get to great later. Though I find it’s rarely needed.

- Ian