Agile marketing blocked: “Taking a guess can get me fired!”
I do a lot of teaching agile marketing to the digital marketing world, ever since the release of my book Do It Wrong Quickly. I once had a class on search marketing where a student lamented that my approach–to experiment and try new things–wouldn’t work in her organization. In fact, she told me point blank, “Taking a guess can get me fired!”
First off, if guessing at Internet marketing can get you fired, you might be working for the wrong person. But assuming that you can actually reason with your boss, or that you can quit before he says “You’re Fired!” and go someplace else, here are the things you need to keep in mind as to why agile marketing is so important, especially for search marketing.
It is absolutely critical that you guess at search marketing because not doing so allows you to do some very bad things:
The direct marketing principles underlying digital marketing are based on the idea that you project what you expect your results to be before doing anything, and then check to see whether it happened before deciding what to do next. Taking an educated guess is crucial to making the whole process work.
I know that it might feel that taking a guess is bad because you want to do something more accurate than taking a guess. Unfortunately, there isn’t anything more accurate. So, the real alternative to taking a guess is not to have any goal at all, which leads to the bad outcomes I outlined above.
I appreciate that guessing is uncomfortable, but it is more comfortable than failing-really failing in your search marketing program. None of us wants to be wrong, but accepting that we mostly get things wrong will help us to eventually get them right. The right answer will only be found by actually doing the guessing for your sites, making changes, guessing again, and seeing how you do.
Think about it this way. When you first stepped up to a bowling alley, you had no idea how to hurl the bowling ball or where to aim it. You took a guess, probably a really bad one the first time. After a while, if you kept at it, you got better at it, until you felt as though you were doing more than just taking a guess-you had an idea of where to aim and where the ball was going. You could have taken all the online courses and read all the books in the world on bowling, but you were never going to succeed by just studying-you had to do it. And it probably wasn’t very comfortable to throw the first ball-you probably felt a bit embarrassed at how badly you did it-but it was the only way to really learn to bowl.
I am making you throw the ball in search marketing. And search marketing is even harder than bowling because the ball changes shape, you can’t see the pins, and they move. And you don’t know what a strike or a spare is, so you need to predict what you expect to happen ahead of time to see whether you are doing a good job or not.
It’s very uncomfortable and very difficult. But not doing it means you are guaranteed not to win and not to improve.
Originally posted on Biznology
Mike is an expert in search marketing, search technology, social media, publishing, text analytics, and web metrics, who regularly makes speaking appearances.
Mike’s previous appearances include Text Analytics World, Rutgers Business School, SEMRush webinar, ClickZ Live.
Mike also founded and writes for Biznology, is the co-author of Outside-In Marketing (with James Mathewson) and the best-selling Search Engine Marketing, Inc. (now in its 3rd edition, and sole author of Do It Wrong Quickly, named by the Miami Herald as one of the 11 best business books of 2007.
Wow, it was a pleasure to read your article Mike. You get the point of direct marketing. I didn’t know about some tips you meant. Thank you!
This is true that there are myths that take us in wrong way. Choosing an irrelevant keyword is one of them. It will be great to have best possible and researched keywords for your website.
Went bowling a few weeks ago with the family and that was a lot more predictable than dealing with the like of google and bing on seo as well as paid search.
Pleasure to read
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