Are you carving your own path? Or just following in the shadow of someone else?
If you’ve ever worked in marketing, you’re familiar with this phenomenon:
The CEO forwards you an email: “Did you see what [competitor] is doing? We should do this too.”
It’s a natural human instinct to watch what other people are doing and wonder if you should follow their lead. They figured out something that works. Why shouldn’t we just copy their strategy?
This phenomenon hasn’t changed much in the 12 years I’ve been working in marketing. The same instincts to watch and copy still buzz at the back of our brains. I still get these forwarded emails. I still see my clients get pulled away from their core strategy by the shiny example of what someone else is doing.
And sure, it’s good to keep your competitors on your radar. Especially in COVID times, we’re all watching and listening for inspiration on how to move forward.
But when we spend all of our attention and energy on what other people are doing, we miss the opportunity to focus on our own work.
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What does our audience need?
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What are our most important ideas?
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What is our driving mission?
And, it’s worth noting that we often get hung up on the public activity we can see other people doing — even when we have no idea whether that activity is actually driving any results. Your competitors could be spending thousands on campaigns that don’t even work.
In other words, I think it’s always better to keep your eyes on your own paper.
I was interested to read how Ryan Law at the content marketing agency Animalz framed this idea this week. He introduces the concept of “second movers.” You might be watching the “first movers” in your industry for inspiration, but you can’t copy their tactics to get the same results. Instead, you might try to be a “second mover.”
He points to Hubspot as a big, powerful marketing brand that marketers have spent years emulating. Hubspot is a first mover:
“…the world in which HubSpot started blogging is radically different to the world of today. The tactics that cemented their success are precisely the wrong tactics to achieve the same goals today—because they’ve already been done.”
It might be useful to draw inspiration from their strategy, but blindly copying it won’t lead to the same results.
“Instead of trying to emulate the strategy of first movers, content marketers today need to home in on the nuance that other companies aren’t getting right. Instead of targeting the biggest keywords and building huge mountains of unqualified traffic, modern content marketing has to prioritize qualified traffic above all else.”
Eyes on your own paper. Focus on your audience. Spend your time digging deeper for your big idea, not wishing you’d thought of someone else’s first.
