Your Marketing is Pointless, Here's Why
Hey! Remember that Peloton ad that went viral this past Christmas season? Or Pepsi’s controversial Kendall Jenner ad that was pulled after just one day? It’s all too easy to spot examples of poor marketing and bad advertising. The reality, however, is that most marketing is not bad or good, most marketing just is.
What do we mean by “is” as opposed to good or bad? Well, most marketing does not offend consumers or induce negative thinking toward a brand (bad), but also most marketing fails to cut through the noise, reach the right target, and influence consumers (good). That means that billions of dollars are spent every year on marketing efforts that, while not apparently bad, fail to move the needle and fail to have a measurable impact on your business. In other words, their marketing is pointless.
How and why does this happen? Here are three of the most common pointless marketing traps marketers fall into, and some tips on how to avoid them:
1. Marketers fail to understand the difference between consumers and followers
Too often marketers get lost in vanity metrics such as how to increase followers on their page or how many likes their posts generate. Now to be clear, those can be useful metrics depending on the objective of a campaign, but they are often not the best metrics for measuring the impact your marketing has on sales.
A remedy for staying out of this trap is understanding your audience. A lot of marketers could probably tell you off the top of their head how many people follow their Facebook page, but how many could tell you what percentage of those followers are aged 25-34? If you’re targeting millennials but 80% of your followers are above the age of 40, you can suddenly see how adding (the wrong) followers can be misleading in evaluating the effectiveness of your advertising.
So don’t let vanity metrics distract you, it’s better to add a dozen of the right followers than a hundred of the wrong ones. Pay attention to your audience!
2. Marketers do not use, or else misuse the creative brief
Don’t underestimate the importance of the creative brief. Marketers that utilize 3rd party ad agencies should be familiar with creative briefs, but that familiarity can sometimes be disadvantageous. Too often briefs result from a highly stylized process that generates generic documents filled with generic jargon.
For those marketers who do not hire external ad agencies, the creative brief is often neglected altogether, and that’s a mistake. Even if you’re a one-man/woman marketing team using audience metrics to generate insights, developing marketing strategies, and even execute the strategies, you should still write a creative brief.
“Why write a brief to yourself or your own team?” you ask? The well-written brief will force you to develop concrete objectives, measures to determine ROI and challenge you to consider what insights and channels to use to accomplish your objectives. Above all, a brief done right will make sure that all of your efforts are centered around your target.
Regardless of which camp you are in, you leave the creative brief underleveraged at your own peril (maybe that’s a bit dramatic, but you get the point).
3. Marketers tend to ask too much and give too little
I hate to break it to you Jerry, but people aren’t gonna be lining up to “learn more” about your pickle-flavored lip balm or rushing to share your ad about your single-serve desktop mini-fridge just because you ask them to do so (at least not usually). In all seriousness, this mistake is practically ubiquitous and it is a problem that is difficult to get right.
If you’re looking to gain real traction and engagement from your target audience, then you need to start thinking about what you can do for them. This idea is starting to really catch on among marketers. Take social currency, for instance, this is a concept that your marketing can provide people with resources (currency) to share with their friends, families, and yes, followers (social). The trick is that the content needs to be worth sharing (funny, touching, interesting, etc.).
While the ideal mix of giving is not an exact science and can vary from category to category, a good rule of thumb is that at least four out of five consumer interactions be giving. To be clear, this isn’t about what your product gives to consumers, this is about what your marketing gives them.
Not sure what this should look like for your brand? Ask yourself these two questions:
How does my marketing create value for my target consumer?
What else can I do or how can I adjust my marketing to create more value for my target consumer?
Summary
Well, there it is. Don’t mistake the difference between consumers and followers, utilize the creative brief, and market what you can do for the consumer. If you do these three things and avoid the marketing traps, you’ll be well on your way to not having pointless marketing.
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We hope you enjoy this blog as we showcase several client cases we’ve worked on, analyze different marketing topics, and hear from Marketing Lab alumni on how the Lab has helped their career. If you have suggestions for our blog content, feel free to send suggestions to byumarketinglab@gmail.com.