How I Define Web Marketing Success

When you set out to do something significant, it’s important to define what success looks like to you, in order to stay focused on achieving your mission. But equally critical to the process of defining success, is balancing your goals for doing that thing with values. When you factor values into the equation, it establishes a system of checks and balances that protects you from pursuing goals in a way that undermines what you’re ultimately trying to accomplish.

Imagine a scenario in which you want to get a job as a Python developer. To do that, you’ll need to take some online courses with the goal of getting certified in Python. If you define success only by the goal of getting the certificate, you may be tempted to take shortcuts like looking up the answers online, using ChatGPT, or perhaps even cheat, none of which help you get a job as a Python developer. But if your definition of success includes values such as “truly learn Python” along with goals like “get Python certificate”, then success can only be achieved by getting there in earnest.

The same thought process applies to web marketing and to business in general. Instituting values along with goals into the equation for success is what distinguishes optimizations from dark patterns, reinforces users as fellow human beings as opposed to cells in a spreadsheet, and forces the weighing of the short and long term implications of your efforts.

Defining Success in Web Marketing

When I think about successful work that I’ve done in the past, and the kind of work that I want to do going forward, it can be essentially boiled down to the following three elements:

Being Genuinely Helpful

Whenever I plan to test or implement a website change, it is important to me that the intent is rooted in helping the user and making their experience better in some way. While not scientific by any means, ultimate success is being able to look back on something that shipped, and say to myself “users are going to love this”. If the thing we just put out into the world doesn't benefit the user, it's still an accomplishment but it just doesn’t feel a successful one to me.

Producing Quality Work that Instills a Sense of Pride

The journalist Hunter S. Thompson famously said “anything worth doing is worth doing well”. This well-known quote perfectly embodies the importance I place on the quality of work. Does the team feel good about what we just launched? Do they want to be professionally associated with it? Do others within the company feel proud about our website? Are other sites copying our ideas? Are there blogs about best practices that are showcasing our work? I find that getting up in the morning for work is much easier if I can answer "yes" to some or all of these questions.

Exceeding Business Goals

Anyone that knows me will tell you that in certain areas, I can be competitive. It’s not so much about doing better than the other person, it’s more of a competition with myself. As an example, as a child, I would try to hold my breath for 1 minute, but every time I would get close, I would just push for at least one extra second or more. My approach to business goals is similar, where hitting the goals is what I'm supposed to achieve, but exceeding them by any amount, even 1%, is what truly feels like success.