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 do