Lent is traditionally a time for giving up indulgences, like chocolate, alcohol, or, in the modern day, excessive social media scrolling. This year, instead of promising to go without the same vice that you pledge every year, why not give up some of the unproductive habits that can make a real difference to your work?
I’m not talking about giving up your daily coffees or your lunch break, but some of the silly, often counterproductive things many marketers are guilty of. Who knows, you might fall in love with a new way of working and carry it on long after Easter…
Give up obsessing over vanity metrics
I can preach this one until the cows come home. Social media follower counts, website page views, and app downloads can all look great in a report, but often tell you very little about whether your marketing efforts are actually working. They aren’t completely useless, just incomplete – they lack the context to give a real performance analysis by themselves.
Sure, 10,000 Instagram followers sounds great, but if none of those followers are clicking through to your website, signing up for your newsletter, or actually making a purchase, there isn’t really much to shout about!
This Lent, give up obsessing over metrics that don’t tie to business outcomes. Instead, focus on engagement rates, conversion rates, and actual qualified leads. You’ll have a much easier time refining your strategy when you start analysing the numbers that really count.
Give up chasing rankings over intent
In a similar vein to vanity metrics, chasing rankings without a real understanding of why is a trap we see many clients fall into. Sure, ranking in position 1 is great (less so than the time before AI Overviews, but that’s another topic for a different day), but does the keyword you’re ranking for actually convert?
This Lent, stop chasing SERP positions without understanding user behaviour. That high-volume keyword with low relevance to your offerings likely isn’t delivering the results that you think it is. Instead, take this time to evaluate the intent of your optimisation. How do people search for your products/services? Is your content answering the real questions that your customers are asking? Are you providing real value?
No more chasing traffic for traffic’s sake.
Give up the “We’ve always done it this way” mindset
As an agency, we come across this issue quite often; clients can find it difficult to welcome a new strategy when they’ve spent years doing the same thing. But the marketing landscape is constantly changing, and while SEO fundamentals do tend to stay the same, strategies that worked well a few years ago may no longer be effective.
Obviously, if something isn’t broken, then don’t fix it. However, that is not a justification for keeping a clearly outdated strategy in place when the results just aren’t there anymore.
This Lent, step out of your comfort zone and give up any strategies you’re only clinging on to because they’re second nature. Instead, conduct regular audits of your marketing tactics, and be willing to update anything that isn’t working. Nostalgia isn’t a business strategy.
Give up perfectionism before publishing
Say it with me: that blog post doesn’t need four rounds of internal sign off, seven meta description rewrites, or a minor existential crisis. Of course, make sure brand guidelines are followed, your facts and figures are correct, and the compliance team is satisfied, but in most instances, there’s no need for weeks of revisions on a single piece of content.
Content doesn’t need to be perfect, but it does need to be out there and generating data that helps you improve. Get it live, let it run, then analyse and re-optimise where necessary.
This Lent, give up the level of perfectionism that prevents you from publishing. Instead, gain the courage to publish and sit back. It’s always better to update the content later based on real performance data rather than theoretical concerns.
Give up last-minute panic work
How many times have you avoided a task that you just really don’t feel like doing, only to complete it mere hours before the deadline? Working well under pressure is a powerful trait in many work environments, but creating pressure where there doesn’t need to be any is not.
This Lent, give up procrastinating on less desirable tasks until they become unavoidable. Instead, block out time to tackle these tasks in a way that suits you best. Perhaps you prefer to knock them all out in the early part of the week, or it may be better to scatter them throughout the week with other jobs in between. Find what works for you, and stick to it.
Give up comparing your results to unbalanced competitors
Sure, you sell shoes, but you’re not Nike. You may sell electronics, but you’re not Apple. Your internal marketing team is a handful of people, not a 50-person department with unlimited resources and a celebrity spokesperson on speed dial.
Everyone thinks their business is the bees’ knees, and that’s okay. But stop comparing your small (in the grand scheme of things) business against global giants and then feeling inferior when your social media campaign doesn’t go viral like theirs did. It’s fine to take inspiration from bigger brands: study what works, learn from their creative approaches, and adapt ideas to your own context, but directly comparing your results is unproductive.
This Lent, give up benchmarking yourself against brands with exponentially larger budgets, and instead compare performance to your own previous results, similar-sized competitors, or realistic industry benchmarks for businesses of your size and type.
A time for self-improvement
We’re all guilty of a few of these habits, and there are plenty more too. But Lent is about reflection, and clearing out bad habits to make space for new, better practices.
This Lent, pick a bad marketing habit and commit to giving it up. Your stress levels will thank you, your marketing results will likely improve, and you might find a new love for uprooting your norms and branching into new ways of working.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to tackle some urgent tasks I’ve (once again) left until a Friday afternoon.