
When is perfect not good enough?
As marketers we are striving to select the best audience, timing, channel to allow us to get the best results. Sometimes we can focus too much on getting everything perfect. So why should I bother with the extra work?
Instead, why wouldn’t we just do things which are nearly there and learn by doing rather than over-analysing?
This is not about doing less or being slapdash, but more about thinking about when you need to go the extra step to make the campaign profitable.
We all are aware of the 80/20 rule whereby we try to get 80% of the value from 20% of our audience. However with more and more data, and ways of accessing and analysing this data, it seems as if paralysis by analysis has set in and we are unable to act quickly.
In fact why wouldn’t we apply the 80/20 again and get 80% of the way there in 20% of the time? This way it might not be the most perfect analytical model for selecting an audience but at least we would have created a campaign, which is still targeted, and it would have gone out quickly to our customers. We can then learn from what worked and didn’t work.