Are You a “Checkbox” Marketer?

• Are you thinking about your marketing primarily in terms of getting it done?
• …creating social posts, ads, images, podcasts, blog posts…?
• …then putting it out there?
• …then you feel like you’re done?

If so, you might be a checkbox marketer.

Now there’s absolutely nothing wrong with getting things done.

Obviously you’re not going to be very successful if you can’t get things done. So, congratulations for getting things done.

Truly. It’s not easy these days. There are a lot of distractions.

But the marketers who are getting the best results are not thinking in terms of just getting stuff done.

Optimizers, the opposite of checkbox marketers are focused on a process that creates maximum results:

• They’re measuring the results of every piece of marketing they put out there.
• They know what metric to look at for every piece of marketing they create.
• They think ahead about how they’re going to track the results.

Now it makes sense if you’re not an optimizer…

• If you’ve never created multiple ads like an AdWords or Facebook ads…
• If you’ve never split-tested landing pages…
• If you’ve never experimented with blog post titles or email subject lines to see which ones people respond to the most…

…then it’s possible you’ve never experienced one of the most important marketing experiences people can have today.

Once you’ve tested a lot of ads or Facebook posts or email subject lines or blog post titles and look at the results you’ve probably had this experience…

“Oh my gosh- that is not the one I thought would work. I can’t believe that’s the one they like!”

If you haven’t had that experience you probably think you have a lot of awesome ideas. You may think all your ideas are awesome. Or you may think all ideas are equally good.

But the fact is the data shows us that the best marketing creative can perform 5 – 10 times better then the worst marketing creative.

And when I say “creative” here I mean the image is the words the ideas. It’s a noun. This is agency speak.

Once you understand that some marketing is dramatically more effective than others, you realize:

• You need more ideas because they’re not all equally good. And
• You need to test those ideas to see which one performs the best with your ideal customer.

So it’s no longer good enough to check off a box that you created a Facebook post.

You need to create a lot of Facebook posts or ads or blog post title for email subject lines…

And you probably already do create a lot of them as a matter of course over a period of days or weeks or months…

But you may not have been going back and looking at the metrics which ones are really awesome and which ones are not.

You may not have been learning from your data.

Or you may not have set things up to get you actionable data.

If you’ve been marketing for months or years and not getting that kind of data you’ve missed out on an incredibly valuable resource that will provide you guidance about how to perform 5  to 10 times better in the future.

A checkbox marketer will create a landing page to collect emails and say, “Thank goodness we’re done with that… check!”

An optimizer will think ahead using a platform that allows them to split test multiple landing pages and create three versions. Within a few days or weeks they’ll see that one is outperforming the others and they’ll stop running the others and their overall campaign results will increase 3 times 5 times… perhaps 10x.

A checkbox marketer can get things done but they can’t increase their value to your company every day the way an optimizer can.

A checkbox marketer can’t get smarter about your customers the way an optimizer can.

Some people will move from checkbox marketing to optimizing as soon as they see the benefits of optimizing. Other people will not.

If you are a checkbox marketer and don’t want to move into optimizing:

• You will never be a strategist.
• You will always be a low-level marketer and low paid
• Someone else will manage you and ask you to do things while they optimize it.

If you have employees who are checkbox marketers who are presented with the benefits of optimizing and do not change their behavior, then you may have an employee who is not capable of modern marketing.

Digital marketing is not simply the completion of tasks. It is a scientific process that includes measurement and data analysis. And its goal is to always improve results and always understand the customer better.

Without this approach your company cannot be competitive.

One more advanced fact for you: no matter how long an optimizer is in the business, they don’t get better at guessing which marketing idea will do the best.

Customers still surprise us. We’re still learning about them. So you have to keep testing.

There are no marketing geniuses out there who always guess right.

It’s the optimizing process that is genius.