How to Stop Random Acts of Marketing

Random acts of marketing are like placing a bet with 100 to1 odds against you. They may pay-off, but the chances are really low.

Marketing teams of all types and sizes are frequently guilty of random acts of marketing. B2B and B2C. Small companies and big companies. Start-ups and established businesses.

So if random acts of marketing are so ineffective, why are they so common and what can companies do about it? To shed light on this topic I spoke with Karen Hayward, Managing Partner at Chief Outsiders, who literally wrote the book on the subject (Stop Random Acts of Marketing: Deliberate & Practical Growth Strategies for Mid-Market CEOs). 

 This article will address topics including:

• Random acts of marketing defined
• How to avoid random acts of marketing
• Understanding the difference between agility, growth hacking and random acts of marketing

Random acts of marketing defined

Jeff Loeb: What is a random act of marketing and why is it a problem?

Karen Hayward: Random acts of marketing are tactics that get deployed without rhyme or reason and are not tied to strategy. It is the sales rep who comes into the office and says, “hey marketing, let’s sponsor this trade show in Milwaukee”, and it’s put into the plan because there isn’t a better way of prioritizing investment. To appease all of the stakeholders, we end up going to that trade show, which costs time, money, and resources. The important questions aren’t addressed like - Does it have the right audience? Is it likely to produce an ROI? Is it the best way to deploy our people and budget? Random acts of marketing are tactics that aren’t metric-driven and aren't backed-up by strategy and insights. They are tactics based on chasing the magical shiny penny. They are activities prioritized based on who has the loudest voice rather than what will drive the best results.

I have spoken to over 50 groups of CEOs over the last couple of years. I always start my workshops by asking CEOs what's on their mind concerning marketing, and what their biggest issues are. And at the end of their laundry list, I always ask about random acts of marketing, and they all start to laugh. And all their heads start to nod. It is what frustrates them the most as they think about marketing. It is a pain point. CEOs want to get more metrics-focused and deliberate about outcomes. CEOs are frustrated with the never-ending chase of trying to find the right thing to do.

Jeff Loeb: What is the opposite of a random act of marketing? What does deliberate marketing look like?

Karen Hayward: It starts with strategy, messaging, and having a really good understanding of your customer, competitors, and company. if you want all of your investments and your tactics to work, you need them to be efficient and backed up with a good strategy. Marketing strategy is all about where to play, what to sell, and how to position the company and offerings relative to the competition. And it all starts with insight. Good strategy is based on keen insight into your customer’s pain points and the problems you solve for them, into your competitors and how to position against them, and into your strengths and how to leverage them to achieve your goals and win. 

Once you have your strategy and messaging locked-down, you can create your marketing mix – the complete set of tactics - that best achieves those goals. The right mix of tactics across the buyer’s journey includes activities like events, content offers, email campaigns, online advertising, social media, inbound marketing, digital marketing, and account-based marketing. Each program should have goals and be measured rigorously. Experiment constantly to find new and better ways to generate high-quality leads at the lowest possible cost. Then do more of the things that work well, and less of the things that aren’t helping you achieve your goals.

How to avoid random acts of marketing

Jeff Loeb: What are the three most important things that companies can do to avoid random acts of marketing?

Karen Hayward: First, define your ideal customer profile, target segments, and buyer personas. Second, create great messaging and use it everywhere. And third, align your sales and marketing teams. Let’s dig into each of these starting with your ideal customer profile. You really need to spec-out where you have the optimal chance of winning in the marketplace. What are the characteristics of your ideal customer profile (ICP)? Define your ICP with as much clarity as possible including attributes like vertical market, revenue, number of employees, what problems they have, geographical location, job titles, and the technologies they use.

 Second, once you have focused on your ICP, create compelling messaging. Take an “outside-in” approach. The message shouldn’t be your own “inside-out” perspective, but rather it's a message that is developed with deep understanding about what your customers value most. Messaging should address the questions of “why buy”, “why buy from us” and “why buy now”.

And then the last thing is sales and marketing alignment. And that's probably the nearest and dearest to my heart because I've been on both sides of that equation. When you have really good sales and marketing alignment, magic happens. Do we have agreement on what are all the job titles that we are going to consider leads? What is the target company size? What is the top line revenue of a great prospect or suspect? What is the right geography? What does a “good lead” look like? What is the right message? Do we have the right sales enablement tools? Do we have the right content across the buyer’s journey? Do we have lead targets defined? Is it clear what percentage of opportunities will be marketing sourced versus sales sourced? Once you get all of those agreements in place, it is much easier to create a plan that avoids random acts of marketing.

Jeff Loeb: Why is it so important to start with strategy and insight?

Karen Hayward: Starting with a strong strategy based on deep insight creates the best chance to get a good outcome. Your salespeople will be more effective. You'll have clear expectations and accountability. Your marketing investments will yield the highest ROI. Unfortunately, many organizations don’t have well-crafted strategies and plans. No one is held accountable. It's just like when you get in your car without a map. If you want to go from Mountain View where I live to Las Vegas, it might take you a lot longer to get there and you might not ever get there at all. But if you have a thoughtful map with your pitstops planned, you're likely to get there on time. It’s really as basic as that.

Jeff Loeb: Marketers sometimes get told, “don’t be so strategic, just execute – we need results now!” How do you respond to that?

Karen Hayward: Well, I would ask, “Why don't you have the results you are seeking now”? It’s the old definition of insanity – doing the same old thing and expecting different results. You got to dig into it and explain to the CEO here's how what you're doing comes across to your potential buyer. So that's number one - get grounded.

 Since marketing is the tip of the spear for sales and revenue, there is always urgency. So being asked to produce results fast is legitimate and comes with the territory. Marketers should always be looking for quick-win opportunities and trying to accelerate results. There are always opportunities for quick hits. And best practice is to implement some quick wins in parallel to developing strategy.  This is a big part of what makes Chief Outsiders so effective. We’re operational leaders that can change the jet engine while we're flying the plane. If you want results in 30 days, an organization like Chief Outsiders can do that, because there's always low hanging fruit. You can do something as simple as fix all the things that are broken on the website, like structural issues that are keeping Google from ranking you highly in search results. You can fix problems like that in parallel to doing the hard work of interviewing customers to find out what they value and how to improve your messaging, and digging deep in competitive analysis. In our work, CEOs are really shocked when they find out what we learn by looking at the competitive landscape and how it is changing.

Understanding the difference between agility and random acts of marketing

Jeff Loeb: What's the difference between a quick hit, growth hacking and a random act of marketing?

Karen Hayward: A good quick hit is something that helps you achieve an important goal, is cost-effective, and leverages available or easy to access resources. A quick hit might be fixing something foundational that is just broken or technically incorrect. For instance, websites are core to just about every business. If there are technical issues that are impacting search results, they should be fixed asap regardless of the marketing strategy. For example, if there are missing meta tags on a website, fix them and you will see immediate results. Another example of a quick hit is filling content gaps. A very common problem is a lack of top of the funnel lead generation offers like ebooks, whitepapers, or webinars. A great quick hit to address this problem is to create an ebook by compiling three to five existing blog posts. It’s a really fast way to solve an important problem quickly without consuming a lot of resources.

Growth hacking is an approach to marketing that has one goal - to drive growth. It relies on experimentation in order to identify new tactics that cost effectively drive growth. It is data-driven and is based on strong measurement of results in order to deeply understand what is working and what is not. Growth hacking is heavily focused on marketing ROI as it is all about small investments to test an idea, then spending time and money on the channels and tactics that work.

 On the other hand, a random act of marketing typically is done in a vacuum. It isn’t tightly aligned with an important goal, and it typically won’t yield a high ROI. Here are some examples of random acts of marketing:

• Sponsoring an event not focused on the ideal customer profile
• Online advertising that drives prospects to your home page vs a specific offer and optimized landing page
• Buying leads from a content syndication agency that are not aligned with your ICP in order to hit a lead generation target

Jeff Loeb: What's an easy way to get started with a more deliberate approach to marketing and building a growth engine?

Karen Hayward: I would start by focusing on your digital landscape. In this COVID world, the one thing we know is buyers are spending more time online researching and evaluating solutions. If your digital footprint isn't top drawer, you're going to lose out on opportunities. I suggest starting by assessing your digital marketing to identify gaps and prioritize an action plan. Here are six key areas to evaluate. 

1. Web traffic: What is your total web traffic and traffic by source? 
2. Search engine optimization (SEO): How are you ranking for your most important branded and unbranded keywords?
3. Digital advertising: Are people finding you with paid search? Are you getting an acceptable ROI?
4. Social media: What channels matter to you? How much engagement are you getting?
5.  Content: Are there gaps in your content across the buyer’s journey? What content is performing the best?
6. Website: Does it articulate your value proposition? Does it convey the right brand image? Does it drive conversions?

Conclusion

Many thanks to Karen Hayward for sharing her insights and expertise on how to stop random acts of marketing. If you want to learn more about how to strengthen your digital marketing, check out this article called “How to create winning B2B websites”. 

About Jeff Loeb

Jeff is a full-stack CMO with a long track record helping software, cloud and technology companies become category leaders and grow internationally. Jeff was a key member of the executive teams that grew dynatrace from $35M to $300M, Navisite from $10M to $100M and Logically from $25M to $52M. Jeff is currently a CMO and growth strategist at Chief Outsiders, the leading "executive as a service" management consulting firm, where he helps CEOs, executive teams and marketing leaders to accelerate growth, build brand awareness, & drive strategic initiatives.