I've been thinking lately about how complex marketing is and how it's almost impossible to really master it. So that left me with the question of "How much do you have to get right to see good results?"

I said about 10% in a recent comment and I think that's a fairly accurate number. Maybe it would be better stated as 20% to align with the Pareto Principle (20% of your effort gets 80% of your results) but that's not really what I'm talking about here either.

I'm merely interested in how much you have to lift your marketing's performance to see great results and become the leader in your industry. Obviously if you're in a highly competitive market you're going to have to have better marketing to compete. But if you've survived this long maybe your marketing's already pretty good so 10% improvement is still relative.

But in most cases the marketing is horrible in most industries. So I truly believe you'll be laughing all the way to the bank if you take just some of the principles mentioned here and implement them. The idea being that once you have that success you'll want more and continue to improve.

Your marketing doesn't have to be perfect

For most businesses the first step is simply doing something beyond the Yellow Pages. If you're already running advertising, have a website, or encourage referrals you just need to look at how you can do these things just a little bit better. Of course you want to do the best job possible but constantly waiting for perfection leads to inaction.

So just get out there and do this stuff - it works - and you can worry about perfecting it later.