There’s a strange thing that happens when something works in marketing: everyone starts doing it.
Someone finds a particular style of advert that performs well and before long, everyone’s adverts look like it. A website converts well, so its layout gets copied. A certain type of LinkedIn post gets attention, so suddenly everyone is writing in the same style, using the same hooks, the same carousels and the same calls to action.
It makes sense. If something has already been shown to work, following it feels like the sensible option. It’s also a shortcut, and shortcuts become considerably less useful when everyone takes the same one.
The safest option might be the riskiest
There’s a lot of comfort in doing what everyone else is doing. You can point at competitors and say, “They’re doing it.” You can find case studies showing that a particular technique works, find a template, follow the instructions and measure the results.
Nobody is going to question why your SaaS website has a massive headline, a gradient background and three cards underneath it. That’s just what SaaS websites look like. Nobody questions why the advert looks like every other advert in the category.
But marketing has a slightly awkward problem: one of its jobs is to make you noticeable.
If the route you choose is the same route everyone else has chosen, you might have reduced the risk of doing something wrong while simultaneously reducing your chances of being remembered.
There’s safety in familiarity, but there’s also a danger of becoming invisible.
Best practice has a shelf life
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with best practice. There are good reasons why certain patterns become common, and we know quite a lot about usability, accessibility, conversion and how people interact with websites. Throwing all of that away for the sake of being different would be equally daft.
But there’s a difference between understanding why something works and simply copying the output.
If ten competitors have independently arrived at roughly the same website, the eleventh company doesn’t necessarily gain an advantage by building another version of it. Sometimes the interesting question isn’t, “What are our competitors doing that works?” It’s, “What are they all doing that gives us an opportunity to do something different?”
That applies to more than websites. Look at advertising within almost any industry and you’ll quickly spot the patterns. Similar language, similar photography, similar offers and similar claims. Sometimes you could swap the logos around and barely notice.
Following the established route might make producing the next campaign easier, but being easier to produce doesn’t necessarily make something more effective.
Efficiency creates sameness
Technology is making this even more interesting. We now have tools that can produce competent marketing remarkably quickly. AI can write the copy, templates can build the landing page, design systems can create the interface and analytics can tell us which variation performed best.
None of those things are inherently bad. I use plenty of them. They make us faster and remove a lot of repetitive work.
The problem comes when efficiency starts replacing thinking.
AI is particularly interesting because it has learnt from what already exists. Ask it for ideas and, unless you push it somewhere unusual, there’s a reasonable chance you’ll get a polished version of something you’ve seen before. Combine that with templates, competitor research and optimisation data and it becomes remarkably easy to produce perfectly competent marketing that looks remarkably similar to everyone else’s perfectly competent marketing.
The shortcut gets shorter, but the destination gets busier.
Maybe we need a different 80/20 rule
Perhaps the answer isn’t to stop following best practice. It’s to stop letting best practice account for 100% of what we do.
I’ve started thinking about an 80/20 approach. Not the traditional Pareto principle, but a simple rule for experimentation.
Let 80% of what you’re doing be informed by what you already know. Use established patterns, previous results, customer behaviour, analytics and experience. Do the sensible stuff that gives you a reasonable chance of success.
Then deliberately leave 20% for something else.
Something your competitors aren’t doing. Something you can’t find a case study for. Something that doesn’t have an obvious template. Maybe even something that feels slightly uncomfortable because you can’t point at another company and say, “They did it first.”
That 20% could be a strange campaign idea, an unusual piece of direct mail, a completely different approach to your website or a bit of humour in an industry that normally takes itself very seriously.
It could simply be saying something that everyone in your industry knows but nobody else is willing to say.
The 20% probably won’t all work
This is perhaps the important bit.
Some of the 20% will fail.
That’s fine.
If every marketing experiment succeeds, I’d question whether you’re actually experimenting. If you already know something will work because you’ve seen it work somewhere else, you’re not really testing anything new.
The trick is making failure affordable. Don’t gamble the entire marketing budget on an unusual idea. Don’t rebuild the whole website because somebody had an interesting thought in a meeting.
Make the experiment small enough that getting it wrong doesn’t really matter, but large enough that getting it right teaches you something.
That makes the 80/20 split quite useful. The 80% keeps things sensible. The 20% gives you permission to explore.
What happens when the 20% works?
This is where it gets interesting.
Something from that experimental 20% might outperform the safe stuff. Perhaps customers respond to it. Perhaps people remember it. Perhaps it starts conversations that your carefully optimised campaign never did.
At that point, you haven’t copied somebody else’s shortcut. You’ve found your own.
You can refine it, measure it and understand why it worked. Eventually it might become part of your dependable 80%, leaving another 20% available for the next experiment.
And eventually, if it works particularly well, your competitors might notice.
They might even start copying it.
At which point it’s probably time to find another shortcut.
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