Insanity and Marketing
Pat has another great post on his blog about a trend in Australia where sports sponsors are seeing a decline in brand awareness – even though they continue to do the same things. What’s the definition of insanity?
Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.
Marketing and Advertising Insanity
Wherever we find an Advertising Agency or a Marketing Firm, we find this don’t we? People tend to admire their own work, ignore the data, and continue to work within their comfort zone:
- Agencies that are great at Flash build beautiful, interactive sites that win awards but no one can find them because they ignore SEO.
- Mass marketers ignore the simplicity of targeting your content on the Internet and then wonder why their content isn’t sticking.
- Video connoisseurs build heavy bandwidth sites with no supporting textual content for the casual reader.
- Brand marketers continue to apply spin to every chunk of content on their corporate website, ignoring their prospects’ requirement for personal contact, transparency and honesty.
- Marketers that dismiss mass media for online because it appears less expensive. If your product is a geriatric device, the yellow pages or classified ad in a targeted magazine may have greater return on marketing investment.
The Best Medium may be the Unlikely Medium
Every marketer or agency excels in specific mediums, but it’s rare that an agency or marketer doesn’t ignore or dismiss mediums that could be helpful. Television, radio, newspaper, direct mail, telemarketing, yellow pages, classifieds, sponsorships, charity, contests, scholarships, memberships, blogging, online video, pay-per-click advertising, email marketing, social networks, search engine optimization – all of these are mediums that do reach people. However, there are reasons why each of these may help or even possibly hinder your marketing efforts.
Consumers and Businesses are Looking for You
Key to selecting your marketing mix is testing those mediums, comparing other (similar) advertisers’ results, reading white papers, following best practices, and finding the most effective mix to gain the appropriate return on investment. Marketers are complaining that consumer attention spans are shrinking but I absolutely disagree. Consumers are trying to find you when you have the right product or service, be it business to consumer, or business to business. It’s your job to place the right information in front of them at the right time and place.
Marketing Mix Changes with Time
There is a third dimension to marketing and that’s time! We tend to look at marketing as a pie chart, calculating each piece of the pie and what percent of the marketing resources will be appropriate. But marketing doesn’t work like this. When you first launch a social network, your media mix may be heavily pay-per-click advertising and perhaps sponsoring contests to build initial readership. However, once you have enough members to sustain growth, your resources may be better spent in search engine optimization since that will leverage your users’ content to build additional growth.
Stop the insanity and push yourself to go against your better judgment! You’ve got an arsenal at your disposal, there is no silver bullet.
