About the Author
Corey Morris is the President and CEO of VOLTAGE, a search marketing and website agency for expertise-driven organizations. He has spent more than two decades in digital marketing and SEO, and he wrote the book on the Digital Marketing Success Plan® (DMSP), the planning process VOLTAGE uses with clients. Corey has published more than 150 articles and expert contributions across Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, and Forbes over nearly a decade, and he still writes regularly for the first two. His Search Engine Journal articles alone have been read nearly 1.7 million times. He has spoken at SMX, Digital Summit, and SMPS. He's also a sought-after podcast and media guest, with more than 75 speaking, podcast, and media appearances. He served as an officer on the board of the global search marketing trade association, founded a Kansas City search marketing conference, and was named the 2019 KCDMA Marketer of the Year.
Digital marketing has no shortage of “best practices,” and you’ve probably heard them all. Publish four blog posts a month, post on social seven times a week and send a monthly email newsletter.
On the surface, these recommendations sound smart. They give teams something tangible to do and provide a sense of consistency, and they even sound strategic because they create the appearance of discipline and effort.
But they’re tactics, and tactics aren’t strategy. When tactics are mistaken for strategy, they stop being “best practices” and start becoming worst habits.
“Best practice” thinking puts activity ahead of impact.
I often see organizations fall into a pattern where activity becomes the entire focus of their marketing. They publish four articles every month because that’s what someone once said was the right cadence, they post on social daily because that’s what they’ve always done, and they repeat the same routines because it feels like the safe, standard thing to do.
The intent behind these actions isn’t wrong. Publishing content, staying visible and maintaining consistency are all positive behaviors. The trouble starts when they’re done without asking a deeper question, which is what these activities are actually accomplishing.
Activity alone does not equal progress. In fact, it often creates the illusion of progress while distracting from what really matters, which is business impact. A content calendar can be full, feeds can look active and charts can show upward trends, but none of that guarantees growth, return on investment (ROI) or alignment with business goals.
Activity without impact creates two big problems.
When marketing becomes an exercise in following best practices, two major problems emerge.
First, it creates a disconnect between marketing and ROI. A team might be producing blogs and posts at a rapid pace, but if those efforts don’t contribute to qualified leads, revenue or retention, they’re just noise. Executives care far more about how marketing is contributing to sales outcomes, revenue growth and overall business health than about how many articles were published last month.
Second, it erodes credibility. When marketing reports numbers like “we published 20 blogs” or “our posts reached 100,000 impressions,” leaders often tune out because they don’t see activity as evidence of value. And when those activity metrics fail to connect to results quarter after quarter, marketing risks being seen as a cost center instead of a growth driver.
This has a compounding effect on teams as well. Marketers burn out when they work hard but never see their effort tied to impact, they feel like they’re spinning their wheels, and leaders begin to lose confidence in their ability to deliver.
“Best practices” become worst habits when they’re applied blindly.
Part of the issue is that best practices are attractive. They’re easy to understand, easy to repeat and easy to benchmark against. If a peer company is posting on LinkedIn every day, it feels like you should too, and if a thought leader says four blogs a month is the magic number, it feels risky not to follow that advice.
The catch is that what’s best practice in one context can be irrelevant, or even harmful, in another. A business-to-business (B2B) company with a six-month sales cycle doesn’t benefit from a daily posting schedule the same way a business-to-consumer (B2C) retailer with a constant stream of promotions does. A small team producing four blogs a month without a clear purpose may waste more resources than they gain in visibility.
“Best practices” become “worst habits” when they’re applied without being adapted to the organization’s goals, audience and resources.
You can break the habit in three steps.
Breaking free from best-practice habits means reframing them as tools, starting points to be evaluated against your actual strategy instead of checklists to be followed blindly, and keeping the ones that earn their place.
The first step is to anchor every activity to strategy. Instead of asking how many times you should post on social, ask what role social plays in driving leads, nurturing relationships or closing deals. Instead of asking how many blogs you should publish, ask what audience problem you’re solving with this piece and how it helps move them closer to becoming a customer.
The second step is to audit your current activity. Look at your calendar, your publishing cadence and your campaigns. Are they driving meaningful results? Do they influence sales conversations, pipeline health or retention metrics? If not, don’t be afraid to change course, because habits, even long-standing ones, need to evolve when they no longer serve the business.
The third step is to shift how you measure success. Vanity metrics like impressions, post counts or content volume can create comfort but rarely tell the full story. The more important measures are tied to business outcomes, like opportunities influenced, sales velocity, customer acquisition cost or revenue growth, and when you report on these, marketing’s value becomes much harder to question.
A framework keeps you accountable.
One helpful way to keep best practices from turning into worst habits is to work within a framework. A framework gives structure and pushes you to connect tactics back to strategy, while still allowing flexibility.
The Digital Marketing Success Plan® (DMSP) is one such framework. It uses the START process (Strategy, Tactics, Application, Review and Transformation) to make sure every marketing activity is connected to business goals. By starting with strategy and working down to tactics, you avoid the trap of doing things just because they’re “supposed” to be done.
DMSP® is one way to do this, and there are other models, and many organizations adapt their own. You don’t have to follow one specific framework, but you do need some disciplined process to hold your team accountable. Without a framework, activity creeps back in and strategy slips out of focus.
The real best practice is alignment.
Best practices aren’t bad. Consistency, visibility and steady publishing are all good things, but when they’re followed blindly, they turn into routines that produce activity without producing results.
The real danger is doing the “right” thing without a connection to ROI, and that’s when best practices become worst habits. The real best practice in digital marketing is alignment between strategy and tactics, between activity and business goals, and between marketing’s work and measurable outcomes.
When that alignment exists, every blog post, every social update and every campaign has purpose. That’s when best practices stop being habits and start becoming growth drivers. If you want help tying your marketing activity to business outcomes, our strategy and measurement team can help.