Untraining your clients about Marketing

I recently came across this sentence while listening to a podcast. This got me thinking.

“You need to untrain your clients if you want better interactions”

You see, your clients are more knowledgeable than ever about marketing. They have a foundation, good or bad, of how it works and most probably understand the ins and outs of social media.

Their knowledge results from years of interactions with the platforms or with agencies, as well as employees in the field. Their knowledge can either accelerate your conversations or create friction, leading to challenging relationships.

The Good-Bad Knowledge Spectrum

1. The more Bad Knowledge of marketing a client has, the more challenging is the interaction. Clients have doubts and have negative perceptions on proposed solutions.
2. As Bad Knowledge decreases and replaced with good one, interactions become smooth. Trust starts to build and clients are more willing to listen.
3. Good knowledge can lead to decisions being challenged. Here, marketers need to come forth with more innovation and show added value.
4. As Good knowledge increases, trust is built; making interactions smooth.

In this article, I am going to cover some key characteristics of clients with bad foundations.

Overcoming “Marketing as Advertising” Bias

“Oh, it's just an advert” “You just have to push the same visual to the press”

I am sure you've heard about these sentences once in your career. Most of the time from clients having limited understanding on the different layers for proper marketing.

In his research paper, Drucker, 1954, outlines that clients who understand marketing as a broader discipline—including market research, brand positioning, and relationship building—are more likely to achieve sustainable success.

I couldn't agree more to this statement. Clients who understand the wide spectrum of marketing are often more receptive to running proper advertising or branding campaigns that resonate with the audience and are more effective.

Shiv Narayanan , CEO of How To SaaS , provides one of the most relevant pyramid of marketing sophistication in his book Exit Ready Marketing.

Educating your clients about the different layers will bring sophistication in how marketing is done and most importantly how results are measured.

Overcoming one size fits all

We frequently see agencies selling one size fits all strategies to organisations due to time, budget, resources constraints. For the clients, this means paying less for exposure on multiple channels and platforms.

The customisation doesn't stop at only resizing a visual to adapt to social media channels requirements. It goes beyond.

Adapting strategies depends on various factors such as the type of audience, business goals for each channel; does Facebook support your Brand Awareness and LinkedIn your Acquisition? -- and many others.

Let me go back to Shiv Narayanan 's pyramid. It is important to educate your clients about the Foundation of their marketing organisation.

Without a proper marketing foundation, results will be limited, content might not resonate, and worse, your clients might be investing in strategies that don't convert.

Overcoming static marketing

There's nothing worse than static marketing. Strategies, approaches, visuals that have been running for months and years without being measured, tested, and iterated.

Marketing is a science which depends on constant changes in human behaviours. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) will change; leaving you on the sideline compared to your competitors.

Iteration in marketing is critical to success. One thing that marketers often neglect is to ask for additional budget to test ideas, do research, and benchmark. Research on disruptive innovation reveals how traditional players lose ground to startups that quickly adapt to consumer trends (Christensen, 1997).

Additionally, the biggest challenge is to convince your clients that the perfect campaign doesn't exist. Evidence supports teaching clients the benefits of iterative marketing and testing, such as A/B testing or agile marketing strategies, to optimize performance (Ries, 2011).

Do you want to receive more insights like this, subscribe to the “The Marketer ??”

A series of thought-provoking articles on marketing strategies and insights