Ten traps marketing managers should stop falling into

We live in exciting times – especially in marketing. Never have there been so many cloud-based hipster ways to do cool stuff and spend the company’s money. With beautiful dashboards and edgy Silicon Valley names. Let’s make one up – what about Mrktngify?

Stop right there. It is waste. The only way to really find out what exactly works is by experience. It helps to make mistakes and learn from them. I know I did. Or - easier - apply some rules before you spend, to separate the ‘core brand value investments’ from ‘nice to haves’ and just bare nonsense. Like AI-based Social Listening Tools – how many of those do you really need in your life?

1)     The ultimate goal of marketeers is to build a stronger brand so their employer can sell more stuff for a higher price. Marketshare or profit growth. It is that simple I believe. Stay close to that. Anything you do that does not help build a better brand has a high chance of failing and will end up in the waste basket. As said in many articles in recent years, nobody has ever built a global brand by just doing all the small stuff, like following people on websites that they have visited recently. or email drip campaigns or lead nurturing. Or chasing people on social media that have shown a specific interest in something similar to what your company sells. It is still about the big picture.

Read old Kotler’s “Marketing Management” if you have not done already. The godfather defined marketing in 1967 as: “an administrative and social process through which individuals and groups obtain what they need and desire by the generation, offering and exchange of valuable products with their equals”.

It does not say anywhere in that book: “we need 20% more Twitter followers”. Literally nobody has ever created a global lasting brand by getting a few more likes on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or Twitter. Twitter is anyway the sewage system of the internet – nothing good has ever come from that. Focus on something compelling instead. Be different.

2)      There is a huge focus on instant and real-time metrics. Measuring everything. Marketing people stare at, or produce, dashboards and graphs every hour. Paralysis by analysis in the marketing world. That artificial reporting urgency is simply distracting; it keeps you away from measuring what is actually important – to figure out what potential customers think about your brand and how to influence that positively - fast.

3)      Generic marketing tools or content items are popular because the vendors of those tools (or web design templates or content pieces or stock photos) want to sell them to as many marketeers as possible. So, they are smooth, superficial, middle of the road, simple, US centric, mildly fashionable and easy to access. And look all the same. In my line of commerce (I market small business hard- and software) I observe that these tools often don’t work. Because they are designed or to be used without specific adaptation to a target audience. For example - b2b vs b2c, or high-end vs entry-level, or enterprise vs small business, international vs American. A blur of mediocre all-the-same.

If you want to be taken serious by subject matter experts as a brand, it really does not work when your marketing department dumbs it down. Substance matters. Storytelling is great but not if you change everything into a fairy tale.

4)      You only see your own message, not the ones from other vendors - or competitors. You don’t know what your prospect buyer gets bombarded with every day. How do you verify if your message is actually resonating? Don’t ever think that your potential customer actually cares about your message. He or she sees hundreds of marketing messages every day and yours is not special. It helps to build a feedback loop with your audience. Test the message. Go the extra mile and create a genuine heartfelt little story. Polish it. While you are at it, get rid of cliché stock photos, spelling mistakes, bad language in general. Throw an interesting edgy picture in. All of this pays off – quality always wins. 

5)      Don’t market just a product or just an isolated feature. Instead, market how you solve a customer’s problem. Readers or viewers think while seeing your message in the first half of a second: “Why do I care? What problem does this solve? Why would I buy this? Why would I buy this from you, specifically? Benefits instead of features. Old example: People don’t want to buy a bed, they just want a good night’s sleep.

6)      Sell the dream. Promise me something. Sell me sushi, not dead fish on cold rice. Upgrade the customer, not just the product. Example: any luxury good. Any expensive car. Apple equips every new iPhone with an improved camera. But they don’t focus on talking about the camera, instead they show beautiful pictures made with an iPhone- making the customer an artist. Old me + product = new me. Try a little harder to make me feel better.

7)      Don’t do what everyone else is doing. Try something new instead. If you run out of new ideas, revisit old tactics that worked in the past. Make a list of those. Talk to veterans in your customer base and ask them what stood out in vendor marketing. Whatever that was. Emails, postcards, catalogues, giveaways, door knockers, advertising, handwritten letters? There is so much that has worked before – it just requires a small update to work again. 

8)      It is often said that it is spam if it happens to you, but it is just “outreach” or “CRM” if you do it to your customer. Don’t do to someone else what you do not want to have done to you. Call it marketing karma. Who on earth approves the sending of these emails saying “We have recently updated our privacy policy”? Who likes to get robocalls? Who wants to receive a spam email with subject “Re: Your email” or  “I came across your profile on Linkedin and …”? There needs to be a "No Asshole" policy at work as well as in marketing.

9)      Nobody ever created a big brand by saying what everyone else is saying. Avoid mistakes and phrases from the past and - please! - avoid clichés. When you want your brand to become top of mind, stickiness and simplicity are everything. Think about a pay-off or tagline that is specific, relevant, genuine, original and ready to be used for years. Google ‘top 10 brands’ and you will find the examples. Are you in IT? Let’s blacklist all these own-horn-tooting BS terms right now: disruptive, do-more-with-less, world-class, fast, innovative, big data, AI, shifting the paradigm, cloud, synergy, mobile, geo fencing, smart something, crypto algorithm and holistic user experience. And no, chances are you are not an IoT thought leader. Or "woke", whatever that means. 

10)  It is difficult to avoid - either micro segmentation or over simplification of your target audience. Example: generation theories. They are not real, they are just an incredible generalization, fueled by social media charlatans like Simon Sinek. As soon as you say “We only market to millennials”, all hope is lost. Don’t assume anything really – there is no need to discriminate. Keep your eyes wide open.

When Facebook gives you 2 billion+ options to target, it is tempting to narrow your selection down. Just because you can, does not mean you have to. There is more value in finding out who is actually buying your product when your target funnel is still big, rather than getting the laser out for another crazy focus exercise (with no supporting evidence for your arbitrary decisions). It is too late. You can’t know what you don’t know.

Another example is the maniacal focus on high open rates of email campaigns, sent to a very small opted-in population for years and years. It is a common assumption that these recipients are the most loyal customers. If all this energy was spent on growing the pool, the final sales result would actually have been much better.

OK - that was a whiny list of things not to do. But - what is it that I actually should do?

Two words: interview customers. Talk to them. It is amazing how much insight you'll get.

As always, please add your perspective in the comments and I will update with naming the source. Thanks for reading!