Attention to detail might just be the very thing that’s bringing your campaign down.

Obsessing over detail is almost every marketer’s ‘thing,’ and it shows. Marketers will spend hours fine-tuning campaigns: picking out the perfect image, carefully crafting copy, and curating the perfect audience for targeting purposes. And of course, each campaign must be different than the last, because any sort of recycling is taboo and unoriginal.

Sounds like you? You may be falling victim to action bias.

Action bias is a built-in psychological mechanism that doesn’t allow us to sit still and tells us that any action is better than leaving things as they are, and you as a marketer are very prone to it. So, you continue your journey of tuning and fine-tuning every campaign, but maybe it’s time to challenge the assumption of new always being better.

Recycling your way to success

As a consumer, you probably don’t remember the image or CTA button colour of the last ad you saw, but as a marketer you still spend oodles of time and money ensuring every aspect is different from the last campaign you created. However, take those assets and focus them on storytelling rather than visual design, and you may just create gold. eBay tried the same by using templates in campaigns, allowing them to focus on the customization of every message. The result: a process that cost a fraction of the price.

Rise of the machines

We know your targeted audience list is probably your pride and joy, but what if you try handing the reigns over to the machines? If you equip a machine with intuition on the factors that are most predictive for customer preferences, it’ll do a great job applying this knowledge at scale and enable you to create personalized content the easy way. For example, Netflix picks the artwork for each viewer based on machine learned recommendations that are fine-tuned over time and improved with each users’ action. That way, viewers are more likely to consume more content as they truly see what appeals to them when on the fence about choosing something unknown to watch.

It might be time to focus on what we as humans excel at; creativity and original thought, and leave the data analysis and targeting to the machines. This way, you invest your assets on customized messaging that has the potential to truly reach out and engage your customers.