How is marketing working for your business?

When I look at marketers I often see a profound sadness in their eyes. They have spent a huge amount of time and effort in learning the most advanced marketing techniques and in many cases “qualifying” for a diploma in marketing.

They might have a decade or more of experience and a real flair for creating and managing campaigns and yet, somehow it doesn’t make any difference.

I know that there are lots of tech solutions on the market that help increase effectiveness of marketing assets such as prospect and customer database, but no matter how they cut this cake what they know is that the trend is downward.

It’s not surprising really because of two reasons:

One - often they are selling in to a market that is contracting - for example, if you are helping companies transition to cloud, each year that passes more companies have made the move so no longer need to transition. Yes, I know that there are still many companies that haven’t and I know that many companies who have need a new solution, but the fact remains that every company that has transitioned to cloud is one less company to sell that initial service to.

Two - more emails are being sent. According to Statista (in billions of emails PER DAY)

• 2020 - 306.4
• 2019 - 293.6
• 2018 - 281.1
• 2017 - 269

You might notice that the rate of increase is itself actually increasing…so the problem is getting worse rather than better. The problem is that there are too many emails being sent. Forget the fact that your email is beautifully designed, incredibly well targeted and that your brand is market leader the fact remains that there are an average number of 61 emails received per account per day.

With this number increasing each year your problem is that nobody has the time/inclination to read what’s being sent. Increasing AI, spam filtering and behavioural changes in the recipients mean that having your content noticed, read and acted-upon is now almost impossible.

So why is this?

Well, we believe it’s because the problem is being compounded by not understanding how people make decisions in this day and age. All of us want to believe that if our prospects have more data to support our assertions that will convince people that they should buy from us, and in theory this is a fair assumption to make…but in practice what happens is that the buyer is overwhelmed by “plausible” solutions to their challenges. Yes, your product/service might be better than others. But the buyer doesn’t know that. They only know that you are telling them your product is best…just as everyone else is saying that their product is best.

The more emails we send the more we compound the problem.

Even if the prospect does read our emails (and usually they don’t) they probably don’t have enough knowledge to appreciate how good we are - they are not as expert as you are, so therefore they probably won’t be impressed by the same things that you will.

So, in the future (and now) what do we need to do to get around this?

Ironically, look to the past. Before the advent of digital, most business was conducted through relationships, referrals, word of mouth and those other personal methods.

People have always been comfortable buying from someone that they like and trust. Digital (and specifically social media) allows us to efficiently scale those personal interactions.

Nowadays with so many 'good" products in the marketplace and so much competition between them it often doesn't matter which solution people buy (and they know this) so in the end it often comes down to who people believe is the right person to do business with and this isn't a decision that we make based on facts we make it based on feelings. This isn't about brochures, white papers and even awards...this is about whether we can relate to (and like) the person we are doing business with.

So marketers (and everyone else in the business) do you have a strategy and an implementation plan to make sure you you can be the solution that people WANT to use? If not, you should make that your major priority for 2022.