Why this idea means business : We share lessons from our least popular articles. Learn why failure reviews should be a key part of your creative process. Read this to learn why knowing what doesn’t work is as valuable as knowing what does.
We’ve published almost 250 articles on this website since we started way back in 2019. And approaching that milestone has made us reflect on what’s worked and what hasn’t.
Of course, it’s tempting to focus only on the winners – our most popular articles.
But it’s also worth reviewing less popular ones, too. The dud articles which just didn’t seem to connect with our audience.
This sort of failure review helps your creative process. No one gets everything right the first time. But you improve by learning from your mistakes. Of which, we’ve made many. So, let’s dig into some example eureka moments and explore the lessons to be learned.
Failure review #1 - Three-Brains Merry Christmas for 2019
Context
A Christmas message just after we launched. It felt like the polite thing to do at the time. People were starting to visit our website. Our blogs were weekly at that time, and we struggled to find relevant things to talk about. It seemed obvious to mention the upcoming holiday break.
Lessons
All of that context sounds fine. However, looking at it now, doing this on our blog seems like the wrong place to do it. We posted the same Christmas message on our social channels and should have left it at that.
Social media is usually a better place to post on topical subjects. Content there works more like news content, with what’s salient grabbing attention. However, once that content loses salience, it fades away into the digital background, never to be looked at again.
So, while we may have got an initial few views of our Christmas greetings, there’s no reason after that holiday has passed for anyone to look at that page ever again. Who cares that we wished people a Merry Christmas in 2019? Or that we repeated the mistake a year later? No one, that’s who.
A key lesson is that we now see blog articles as more for “evergreen” content. We write articles designed to be useful, irrespective of when they’re read. Almost all our articles now cover common problems our customers have (and ideas on how to fix them), rather than talking about current events. (e.g. our articles relating to Covid).
We can also see that this message wasn’t aimed at anyone in particular. We sent personal Christmas wishes to our customers at that time, and that makes sense. But a broad and unspecific Christmas wish to everyone feels impersonal. We reckon that’s also part of why so few people visited this page.
Failure review #2 - T-shirt shop learnings - Part 2
Context
We’d shared some ideas when we first launched our shop. This article was the follow-up.
It shared ideas we’d tried on the store’s design and marketing. Plus, other areas we’d explored, e.g. buying in pre-made T-shirt design bundles and adapting them.
Lessons
A few things jump out reviewing this page.
It’s clearly written when we were still trying to figure out our business’s purpose. That’s OK. But unless you’re in that same position yourself, it’s not interesting to read about. Who wants to hear someone else’s problems?
It’s clear we were still working on our positioning. You can see that by the way we picked a generic insight around parenting for our design. Looking at it now, that has zero relevance to the services we offer. So the brand identity and tone of voice feel “off” compared to how we do things now.
A few more technical lessons we didn’t spot at the time.
We called this “part 2”, but there isn’t an obvious “part 1”. It was actually called “week one learnings”, and while you can see the links between them on the page, they’re not obvious on the main blog page. Confusing for our audience.
It also covers 3 separate topics – simplifying designs, using external short-cuts for T-shirt designs and Facebook advertising. These seem a bit disjointed from a reader’s point of view. Loosely bolted-together ideas make it feel like there’s no flow to this article.
What we learned from this is to outline topic ideas before you write an article. This helps you check that they join together. Get your big overall idea clear in the title, and then connect sub-ideas below it to bring it to life. We plan our articles better these days, so they’re rarely this random now.
Failure review #3 - Start-up experts will start stalking you
Context
Written from our start-up point of view, this article shares our experiences and observations about the advice on offer in that area.
It points out the flaws in how much of that advice is conveyed, something which was clearly frustrating us at the time.
Lessons
The idea for this was to help our site connect to the keyword term “start-up experts”. However, people searching on that term are more likely to be looking for positive and supportive advice. But that’s not what we covered here.
Flipping it the other way isn’t necessarily a bad thing, creatively. However, the result is very much written as a series of “watch-outs” for bad advice given to start-ups. This gives the whole article a negative tone, and that doesn’t help draw readers in or keep them interested.
That’s reflected in us sharing some negative emotions (e.g. talking about being annoyed), and this probably put some off. No one likes a whinger. The negative word in the headline (stalking) also doesn’t help.
This article also has a choppy flow, with a string of observations and asides about the people who offer start-up advice. This would have been OK, but reading it now, it would have been better to offer positive alternatives to the negative comments. E.g., not just watch out for x, but watch out for x and do y instead.
The final lesson from this particular failure review is that “start-up expertise” is a broad and very competitive topic. Start-ups need advice on all sorts of areas, not just marketing. We’d have got more traffic had we made our marketing focus clearer. We should have done that in our choice of title, keyword and how we wrote the introduction.
Failure review #4 - On your marks, get set, build your e-Commerce knowledge
Context
Our e-Commerce knowledge article was supposed to focus on how to do things faster when selling online. That’s implied in the title and hero image.
However, it’s not reflected in the idea of “building knowledge”, which takes time to build. The article shares lessons from our first experiences in building online stores.
Lessons
Journalism has an expression called “bury the lede”. This is when you put your story’s main point too far away from the introduction, so that the reader loses interest and stops reading before they get to it. You want to land your main point as early as possible.
This article is a good example of us burying the lede. The main point is the time differences between our first-ever store launch and those which followed. Our first launch, when our knowledge level was low, took 4 months. But using the knowledge from the first launch meant our second store only took 4 weeks. However, you have to read quite far into the article to realise that, i.e. the lede is buried.
We also tried to creatively spin the writing by using the “on your marks, get set” line from athletics and the hero image of the sprinter. The idea was to imply speed. However, looking at it now, it’s quite a weak analogy. There’s no obvious link between e-Commerce and sprinting, and while it’s not terrible, it’s just a bit meh, in retrospect. It feels forced. Contrived.
One last overall learning here is that e-Commerce has a finite number of topics you can cover. Though we still write about it occasionally, we reduced how often we featured it in mid-2024, and it’s now more of a secondary topic.
Our primary focus is now on using psychology and creativity to improve marketing. E-Commerce remains a great channel to do that in, because of the control it gives you. You can create and craft ideas there without needing to go through traditional retail channels. But that’s about the only context in which we’ll now write about it.
Failure review #5 - Online marketing opportunities - communication, social and productivity
Context
We’d written an article on digital services which covered what customers might need from online. It covered information, entertainment and shopping.
However, the TNS survey, which prompted that article, also outlined 3 other online customer needs. Not wanting to throw away the value of those insights prompted us to write this article.
Lessons
Reading this now, the article still has some helpful insights and ideas. However, our biggest learning is that we could have conveyed those ideas much more clearly.
Part of this is that we were springboarding on a third-party piece of work. Giving our thoughts on how to use what someone else had done. That’s OK as a creative approach. However, the trick we missed is that those original ideas were quite complex. We could have done better at simplifying them.
For example, look how complicated the title is. Only 8 words, but 4 of them have 3 or more syllables, and the whole sentence has 24 syllables. The long words also cover abstract ideas – marketing, opportunities, communication, and productivity.
If we wrote this article today, we’d focus on the benefits of those areas. We’d shorten the words and make the ideas more tangible. For example, talk to your customers, rather than communication. Help your customers do more, rather than productivity.
We also think this article tries to cover too much ground. It doesn’t do any of the topics enough justice. This could easily have been 3 articles, one each on communication, social and productivity. By lumping them all together, but not going into much depth on any of them, it’s not that helpful to the reader. Our key learning from this is to think more about what the reader might actually need, rather than telling the reader all the things we know.
Conclusion - Failure review - lessons from our least popular articles
So that’s it. Our five dullest and duddest articles. Do we feel embarrassed by these? Nope. We wrote them with good intent. They meant something at the time, and if readers made the effort, they’d still find some helpful insights.
However, what’s more important is what we learned from doing this failure review. Ideas, topics and ways of working that we’ve learned don’t work for our audience mean that we don’t repeat those mistakes. This is about making intelligent failures – failures that you learn from to improve your craft.
Check out our learn from your mistakes article for similar lessons learned on marketing projects. Or get in touch if you’d like some coaching on how to set up and learn from your own failure review.
Photo credits
Prowling cat : Photo by Harry Cunningham on Unsplash
Sprint : Photo by Braden Collum on Unsplash
Dollar lights : Photo by Chronis Yan on Unsplash
