Everybody makes mistakes.
But you don’t have to keep making them.
Worst practices are universal—I see them in agencies, on internal teams, at consultancies, and in startups. Here are the ones that will wreak the most havoc as you work to leverage data, automation, and AI. Give me a call if any of them apply to you.
WEAK GOVERNANCE. It lets the wrong people take charge, destroys content quality, tanks user engagement, and burns out good people faster than anything else. ALL other worst practices come from this.
CANARIES IN YOUR COAL MINE: You don’t use RACI models to exclude unqualified people from workflows. You lack executive sponsors. You design web pages and other deliverables before you write the content that they’ll contain. You let Project Managers and other non-creative roles provide binding feedback on writing and design. You have no guidelines about what kind of information goes in email vs. what goes into tools like Slack or Teams.
MISSING STRATEGY. Strategy connects your brand’s goals to its tactics. Do your customers need yet another newsletter or is that just the thing you’re set up to do?
CANARIES IN YOUR COAL MINE: Your tactics never change. You don’t use customer journey maps to guide what you send or when you send it. You don’t ask customers what they need from you. Junior people can’t articulate the difference between your tactics and your strategy.
BEING REACTIVE. The business knows what’s coming most of the time but you probably have to ask them. Get ahead of it, especially events.
CANARIES IN YOUR COAL MINE: You lack an org-wide editorial calendar. The time you have available dictates the quantity and quality of work instead of the reverse. You don’t enforce SLAs for content work. You let stakeholders ignore deadlines. You don’t use creative briefs. You start event comms two months before the event, then kick off each comm individually.
NOT DRIVING REVENUE. We all love crushing internal KPIs. But if those KPIs don’t fatten up the bottom line, then they’re not serving the brand.
CANARIES IN YOUR COAL MINE: You drive traffic to places where you can’t measure it. The first solution to most problems is to create a newsletter. Your HR scorecards show “X number of pieces created” instead of “engagement increased by Y” or “revenue increased by Z.” Your people ignore personas, style guides, and other brand guidance in favor of personal agendas. You let MQLs guide everything you do.
SEEING CONTENT AS A CREATIVE PROBLEM. It’s a production problem.
CANARIES IN YOUR COAL MINE: You don’t use a DAM system. You make up project folder structures and file naming conventions on the fly. You’re not actively studying how data, automation, and AI-enabled tools can help you create, use, and reuse content. You create one-off executions instead of a Bill of Materials (BOM) for each project.
DOING THINGS MANUALLY. We live in an automated, AI-driven world. Figure out what your people do best and what machines do best, then combine them.
CANARIES IN YOUR COAL MINE: You wait months for internal teams to build what you could buy this afternoon. You send sales-related email via Outlook instead of Marketo. You have kickoffs for individual emails instead for email campaigns. You’re constantly starting projects over.
OBSESSING OVER FEATURES AND TECHNOLOGY. If you don’t solve problems for customers, then they’ll find a brand that does. Lead with that.
CANARIES IN YOUR COAL MINE: You focus on the CIO and the CTO and ignore roles focused on innovation, growth, and operations. Your people say things because they need to say them, not because users need to hear them. You drive traffic to places where you can’t measure it. You don’t measure everything you do.
THINKING THAT TECHNOLOGY CAN ENGAGE PEOPLE. It can’t engage anyone. Only the content that it delivers can do that.
CANARIES IN YOUR COAL MINE: You make decisions on opinions, not data. Your email bounce rate is high because your copy triggers spam filters. You don’t constantly refine metrics to reflect a better understanding of engagement. You don’t use customer journey maps.
Somebody else’s best practices may be wrong for you.
They can destroy your differentiation, strangle innovation, and push good people out the door. Avoiding worst practices is the best practice on which all others are founded. If you can honestly say that your org has rid itself of worst practices, then maybe you have time to chase best practices.
Let’s talk about how your brand can avoid worst practices.
johngaineswrites@gmail.com 206-498-0798