When to ignore a marketing best practice

Sixteen blog posts a month.

For years that number set the content plan for thousands of businesses. It came from HubSpot, which looked at blogging data across more than 13,500 of its own customers.

Companies publishing 16 or more posts a month generated about 4.5 times the leads. The comparison group published four posts a month or fewer.

The finding was sound. It was also a portrait of the people HubSpot sold to. They were software companies, mostly, with marketing staff and a budget for writers.

Then the number left home. It turned up in agency pitch decks and strategy documents. It reached accountants, orthodontists, and family law firms with nobody on staff to write anything at all.

Open that HubSpot page today and the number is gone. The article now answers the same question with "it depends." Then it sorts the answer three ways: blog age, subject complexity, and the writing help you can pay for.

The rule outlived the conditions that produced it, and it outlived the page that published it.

Advice keeps traveling long after the conditions behind it have changed.

A best practice is a record of someone else's conditions

Every piece of marketing advice was generated somewhere. Someone tried something in a particular business, selling a particular thing at a particular price. The buyer was specific, and so was the year.

It worked, and they wrote it down.

The instruction travels. The conditions stay home.

David Meerman Scott made the point in 2012, and the example he picked has aged into the argument. Most markets, he wrote, carry a best-practices script people treat as law. He noticed that HubSpot had grown by ignoring the venture-capital playbook of its day.

He also noticed that HubSpot's own method had by then become the new script for thousands of its customers.

A script becomes a script by working somewhere first. That is what makes it persuasive, and it is also why it misleads.

So the useful question is not aimed at the advice. Somewhere, for someone, the advice worked. The question is whether you are that somewhere.

Ask what had to be true for this to work

Take any piece of marketing advice you have been handed and run it against four questions.

• Who was selling, and what were they selling, at what price?
• Who was buying, and how did those buyers decide?
• What did the seller already have when they started: an audience, a team, a budget, a known name?
• When was this, and has the channel changed since?

Then count. Where you share most of those conditions, follow the advice and stop deliberating. Where you share some, adapt it and expect a weaker version of the result.

Where you share none of them, what you are holding is a description of someone else's business.

The 16-posts rule fails that count for almost every expert practice. Picture a consultant selling a $40,000 engagement to nine clients a year. That business has little in common with a software company selling seats to thousands.

The buyer is different and the sales cycle is different. One qualified reader is worth more than 10,000 unqualified ones. In that practice, depth does the work that volume does for the software company.

Ask what had to be true for this to work, then count how many of those conditions you have. That count is the whole diagnosis. You can run it in a minute, without hiring anyone.

Most best practices survive the check

Most of the standard advice is worth following, and pretending otherwise would cost you.

Your site loads quickly. You say what you sell and who it is for. Your pages answer the questions a buyer needs answered before they will contact you.

Your listings carry the correct name, address, and hours, and your email reaches the inbox.

These conventions rest on how people read and how machines index, and nearly every business shares those conditions. Following them earns you nothing distinctive. Skipping them costs you.

The rules your profession sets sit in a different category. An attorney's bar association and a clinician's licensing board publish requirements rather than suggestions.

Those requirements govern what you can claim, whatever a marketer recommends. Verify them with your own board before you publish anything close to the line.

One more failure is worth naming, because it wears the costume of independence. Going off script for its own sake is a formula too.

Refuse a convention because refusing feels bolder, and you have traded one borrowed rule for another. You still have not looked at your own business. A deviation needs a reason you can say out loud in one sentence.

The order runs from your business to the tactic

A typical agency builds one specialized service. Then it works to persuade every business it can reach that the specialization is the answer.

The agency is not lying. The service works, for the businesses whose conditions match the ones it was built for.

What the model cannot do is tell you when you are not one of them. Saying so ends the sale.

I start from the other end. What do you sell, at what price, and to whom? How do the people who hire you find you now?

Those answers decide the strategy. The strategy then decides the tactics.

That order settles a lot of arguments that look like taste. It tells you how tightly to draw your positioning. The right width depends on who has to recognize themselves in it.

It tells you whether the brand still fits the business, or whether you have simply grown tired of it. And it explains why a template can look finished and still convert nobody. A template arrives with someone else's assumptions built in.

None of this asks you to become a marketer. It asks you to know your own business better than the person handing you the advice. That is the advantage you start with.

The advice was true somewhere

When a tactic gets scored against what practitioners report rather than what vendors claim, the same pattern keeps surfacing. The tactic worked, and the conditions were doing most of the work.

The write-up named the tactic and skipped the conditions.

So take the advice seriously, and take your own situation just as seriously. Ask what had to be true for it to work. Then look at what is true for you.

Where those two lists overlap, you have a plan. Where they do not, you have someone else's plan. Following it can cost you a year you will not get back.