The Adaptive Marketer

Are You Moving Fast – Or Is Fast Moving You?

Posted on 01. May, 2010 by Robert Rose in Online Marketing

Let’s be clear – I’m no marathon runner.   I get tired driving 26 miles – much less running that far.   But I know a few hard-core runners and they all tell me the same thing.  A common mistake that newbies make when they’re training for the marathon is that they run their interval races too fast and don’t fully recover before they run again.  They believe that this will get them to 26 miles faster.  But, in actuality, it lengthens the time it takes them to get to that distance.

Lately, I have been noticing a very similar trend in marketing departments.  There’s an increasing pressure to move faster and faster.  But, there’s a real difference in marketing organizations that like to think they’re moving fast – and ones that really do.

Some Are Fast, Some Achieve Fastness, Others Have Fastness Thrust Upon Them

With all apologies to the Bard, consider that even three years ago we didn’t have a way to put ads on Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter.  Mobile advertising was really just an abstract idea for most of us back in 2008.  And, content marketing is just now starting to really get its legs.  Oh, and by the way we marketers now have responsibility for making sure that our Social Media strategy conforms with our CRM strategy – and that we don’t accidentally set off a PR nightmare by letting the intern update our Facebook page.

And the pace just seems to be getting faster and faster.  Now, we have iPhone and iPad app development, Facebook content targeting,  landing page offer segmentation, SEO strategies, advertising re-targeting, measurement and social media marketing and CRM.   And we need to be on top of it – um, like now.  Sheesh.

But just remember something – You can get the fastest computer in the world.  But the blinking cursor waiting for you to type in something smart – blinks at the same speed.

Are You Moving Fast – Or Is Fast Moving You?

So, Harvard just did a study with The Economist where they looked at about 350 businesses. They split these companies into two groups.  The first were businesses that took a strategy of “breakneck speed” – basically running, full out, as fast as they could.   The second were companies that made a conscious decision to “slow down” in order to check in to make sure they were on the right track.

Guess which ones performed better?

That’s right. The study concluded that those that “slowed down” to speed up actually averaged 40% higher sales and 52% higher operating profit.  This brings up a question for us as marketers:

Is your marketing organization now moving too fast?   Are you skipping the details, relying on metrics that don’t really mean anything?  Do you understand the narrative you’re trying to create?   And most important of all:

Are you moving so fast that you can’t even enjoy the true, creative process of marketing any longer?

Now, the HBR study concluded there were “strategically fast companies” and “strategically slow companies”.  I’ve taken the lessons that the HBR/Economist study concluded and combined them into 3 lessons we might be able to specifically apply to our marketing strategy.  I’ve grouped them into two segments – “You’re Moving Fast” and “Fast Is Moving You”:

Reviewing The Work

When Fast Is Moving You: You look at the numbers, note the results and use them only to rate/prove your success – not to draw creative insight and make an actionable plan.

When You’re Moving Fast: Really Review (no, I mean *really*).   Metrics and KPI’s are much more than Pass/Fail.    Slowing down and *really* reviewing the results from your experiments develops into learning and insight that can improve results.  This goes way beyond just seeing which landing pages convert at a higher rate.  But what does that really mean?     Now, it might mean simply that.  But, perhaps we want to dig just a bit deeper and see why.  Was it different traffic patterns?   Why does that particular hero image resonate more with buyers?  What effect might that have on other parts of our business?  Where might we apply that learning elsewhere in the organization?

Our Ability To Experiment

When Fast Is Moving You: Our ability to try new things and technologies is solely focused on how we can lower costs and become more efficient.

When You’re Moving Fast: Our ability to try new things and experiment with new technologies is what defines our success.

Simply using technology or new ideas and processes as a way to decrease costs is a great way to run right down the middle of mediocrity road (see my post on best practices).  Additionally, if we jump right into a new initiative, without any consideration of what its true value will be to our marketing – it may move fast – but it will be a waste of time.

For example, I know a company that put up an A/B Test landing page.  They really needed about month to get any statistical relevance.   But after one week, when the landing page results hadn’t surpassed the previous, it was called a failure, and immediately pulled.    If you immediately take that test down after a week because you think it’s producing less results – you might think you’re “acting fast”.  But actually fast is moving you.

Instead, we should take some time – and plan our experiments.  We should give them all the time they need to work – and then review the results.  We will learn just as much from our failures as we do from our successes.

When You’re Too Focused To Feed Your Cobbler’s Children

When Fast Is Moving You: We’re really focused on fine tuning our offers so that we continually attract the same kind of customer.  We don’t have time for outside training or learning for our team because we’re so focused and moving so fast.

When You’re Moving Fast: We set aside a certain percentage of time for out-of-the-box innovation.  Any team member may have something interesting to contribute.  We have to constantly be looking at what’s going on externally to our business, our industry. New learning and training are critical.

This one can seem obvious, but it’s critically important and I’ve watched many companies slide into these patterns.   It’s so very easy to get wrapped up in the daily grind of our processes and (quite frankly) our successes that we never stop to poke holes in what we’re doing.  Even when we’re successful, we should be asking ourselves what can we do to shake things up.

In the end, of course, all of these practices are about leadership.  Whether you are at the top – or report up to the top – three things need to be fostered in order to be “fast”:

• Permission to get it right, not getting it quickly
• Permission to fail – and an allowance in your budget for failures
• A focus on innovation and a commitment to excellence over speed

There’s a great quote from Dr. Robert Anthony that I really like and I think sums all this up well.  It says “moving fast is not the same as going somewhere”.

What about you?  How do you measure fast?