Why You Shouldn't Rely Too Much on Best Practices

Many marketing leaders and frontline marketers have a "thing" for marketing best practices. And, it's easy to understand why.

Marketing success is difficult to achieve and even harder to sustain because the marketing environment is always changing and because it's incredibly hard to predict what marketing methods and messages will resonate with potential buyers.

Under these circumstances, it can feel immanently reasonable to identify the marketing tactics successful, high-performing companies are using and then emulate those practices. So, it shouldn't be surprising that many marketers are enamored with "proven" best practices.

Marketers often see best practices as effective and reliable tools for achieving marketing success, but the reality is more complicated.

Best practices can be helpful when they're understood correctly and used appropriately, but it's easy for marketers to become enthralled by their benefits and forget about their limitations. Two of those limitations are particularly important.

They Don't Tell the Whole Story 

Most marketing best practices come with an explicit or implicit promise:  Use this practice and your marketing performance will improve significantly. However, the reality is rarely that simple.

A marketing best practice typically describes a single aspect of marketing or a small set of related marketing activities. But, marketing success usually results from the combined effects of numerous factors, many of which the best practice doesn't address. Therefore, a best practice rarely provides a complete "formula" that will guarantee a large-scale improvement in marketing performance.

Francois Bazini discussed this issue in a column published last month in Marketing Week. Bazini wrote:

"One of marketing's most persistent habits is to turn successful outcomes into portable principles. We see a company win, a brand grow or a challenger break through, and immediately begin asking what others can learn from it . . .

More often, the useful question is not whether the example is impressive, but what exactly made it work.

This is how many best practices are born. We look at successful companies, list what they did, and start connecting the winning dots . . . Each observation may be true. The mistake is to assume that each one explains the success or think it will produce the same results somewhere else."

Our tendency to treat best practices as "portable principles" and all-inclusive formulas for success is what Phil Rosenzweig called "The Delusion of Single Explanations" in The Halo Effect . . . and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers. 

These days, many of the products we buy come with warning labels highlighting the bad things that can happen if we don't use the product correctly. Most marketing best practices should come with this warning label:

WARNING:  Marketing success results from the interplay of numerous activities and conditions, not all of which are addressed in this practice. Therefore, the use of this practice may produce less-than-expected results if other factors required for success are absent.

Widespread Use Reduces Effectiveness

One of the most paradoxical characteristics of marketing best practices is that the more widely they are used, the less effective they tend to become.

Marketing best practices can derive their effectiveness from several sources. A practice can be effective because it is based on sound business principles, or because it resonates with how potential customers make decisions, or because it leverages the capabilities of a particular medium of communication.

But, best practices are also often effective because they are exceptional. When a best practice is new, it tends to be used by only a few companies. Therefore, the practice stands out in the marketplace and more effectively captures the attention of potential customers. The distinctiveness also serves to differentiate the company using the practice from its competitors.

Unfortunately, though, as more and more companies adopt and use a best practice, it will lose some of the distinctiveness that made it highly effective.

Image courtesy of James Whatley via Flickr (CC).

Why Your Marketing Tactics May Be Out-of-Sync with How Your Customers Actually Buy

Marketing WITHOUT Market Research

The results of several recent surveys of business buyers suggest that many of the marketing tactics currently used by B2B companies are based on an inaccurate picture of how business buyers actually make purchase decisions.

Here are four of the most noteworthy surveys:

• The 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Study by 6sense

• The "buyability" research by LinkedIn and Bain & Company[1]

• A 2022 survey by Bain & Company and Google

• A 2021 survey by WSJ Intelligence and B2B International

Taken together, these surveys paint a picture of B2B buyer behavior that differs significantly from the model used by most B2B marketers. For example, they suggest that:

• Most of a company's potential customers are not actively evaluating the kinds of products or services the company offers at any given time. A trigger of some kind is usually required to motivate a potential customer to begin an active buying process, and marketing programs alone are rarely sufficient to cause a potential customer to initiate a buying process.

• At or near the beginning of a buying process, most buying groups create a list of potential vendors they believe are worth considering, i.e. an initial consideration set. The initial consideration set is created before most members of the buying group have conducted any research and is based on the mental impressions they've formed from a variety of touchpoints such as their prior first-hand experiences, marketing messages, news reports, and conversations with colleagues and peers.

• When a buying process begins, most members of the buying group are likely to be familiar with the product or service category involved in the prospective purchase. Many will have already been involved in several buying processes involving the same category.

• Many buying groups not only create an initial consideration set, they also rank the potential vendors in their consideration set in order of preference before they engage with any of the potential vendors.

• Most buying groups make almost all of their purchases from vendors in their initial consideration set, and most buy from the vendor they ranked at the top of their shortlist.

These survey results indicate that many of the marketing tactics used by B2B companies are out-of-sync with real-world B2B buyer behaviors. For example:

• B2B marketers frequently run marketing programs designed to persuade potential buyers to begin a buying process, but the research suggests that such programs are largely ineffective.

• Most B2B marketers assume that most members of the buying group are not familiar with potential solutions when the buying process begins, and therefore they create a significant amount of "educational" content. However, the research suggests that most buyers are already familiar with most potential solutions at the beginning of the buying process.

• Most B2B marketing efforts are focused on buyers who are engaged in an active buying process. But, the research suggests that most business buyers identify a shortlist of preferred vendors at the beginning of their buying process and almost always purchase from one of those vendors. Therefore, most B2B marketers are largely ignoring potential future buyers when they are forming their opinions about vendors.

If these survey results are accurate, it's clear that many B2B marketers need to make significant changes in their strategies and tactics. But, there's a catch.

None of the surveys described above claimed to use a representative sample of all B2B buyers. Therefore, the findings of these surveys cannot legitimately be "projected" to all business buyers. This explains why market research is vital for all B2B companies.

To develop effective marketing programs, a marketing leader must have an accurate view of how their company's potential customers make purchase decisions, and primary research is usually the only way to obtain this critical information. While data on this issue is scarce, it appears that most B2B companies are not investing sufficiently in this type of research.

In a column for Marketing Week, Mark Ritson made a compelling argument that companies should invest 5% of their marketing budget on market research.

Ritson argued that spending 5% of the budget on research is essential to ensure that the remaining 95% of the budget is invested appropriately. He wrote, "If you cannot invest 5% of your marketing budget on research you do not know what you are doing and you will not be able to make the right moves."

Image courtesy of Jeff via Flickr (CC).

[1]  The LinkedIn/Bain & Company research is described in two LinkedIn articles by Mimi Turner, the Head of Marketplace Innovation at LinkedIn. Those articles can be found here and here.