I like browsing Quora from time to time because its very existence states there is no such thing as a stupid question. People are allowed to challenge status quo including marketing. They ask, "Do marketing people do anything useful? "Why do people do marketing jobs? "Is marketing evil?"
It's getting even more perplexed for digital agencies (Tom De Bruyne wrote about the end of the digital agency in 2013!) Very often they are perceived as a transplanted limb poorly synchronized with other body staff.
«We've hired a marketing agency once but it didn't work out» — business executives say.
During my career of an in-house marketing manager and years of running an online marketing agency, I learned common misconceptions in how top management embraces marketing endeavors. Let me dispel these delusions.
Chuck Norris is unsure if marketing makes any sense#1. You Do Not Have Numbers To Judge By
Have you vocalized what your marketing needs are? Are they requests, sales, registrations, installations? Then go for it and ask marketing specialists how many of these they get monthly and at what cost.
Our team happened to provide extensive web analytics to one oncology center in the US. We knew they also hired a local agency to run online advertising for them. Now and then representatives of this center inquired if they were getting enough appointment requests from the website. Since they did not have access to their advertising account and it was not linked to any analytics systems, oncology team could only assess advertising performance through agency reports.
Not surprisingly, they expressed concerns whether data was true when their medical staff appeared underloaded.
Stick to actual data as much as you can. Get acquainted with data infrastructure at AirbnbEng.
Let's say you need to calculate marketing budget for advertising activities. Operate with data you only have a track record of — traffic volume, cost per click, visitor-to-customer conversion ratio and other tractable metrics.
If you tell your marketing staff an approximate number you expect visitors to convert into customers and later it turns wrong, final marketing budget figure will be a waste.
Marketing is no different from Newton's physics: they both rely on numbersAgain, don't put trust into numbers you hear but the ones you see with your own eyes.
#2. Marketing Team Is Out of The Loop
For maintaining a positive return on investment, marketing team should be aware of revenue, expenses, average order size & cost, and lifetime value of different customer segments to see the forest for the trees and make the best possible moves.
Marketing folks are the first to be updated about items that are available and those not in stock, the reasons why clients ask for refunds, setup and configurations issues users encounter when calling for support.
The main point is that marketing department should not operate in isolation.
Marta Olszewska strongly suggests to "involve them [remote marketing team] in what's happening in the company."
On the opposite, marketing specialists need to be connected to literally every business department — through the network of integrations (analytics systems, CRM, call management services, warehouse databases, etc.) and regular corporate meetups.
Politics proves it — cooperation is better than isolationIf you want to grow your business guided by wisdom and creativity of marketing people, make sure all departments are interconnected and work as one integral unit.
#3. No Time for Strategic Thinking and Research
Marketing success is not confined to hard work only. There are many reasons why even the most fantastic marketing efforts may crumble into dust. [Find out why in fact some famous companies are losing money explained by Victor Luckerson]
I know a lady in Canada engaged in selling soft robotics toolkits. During several months of collaboration with different marketing agencies, she became disappointed by all of them because despite all their activities she got zero sales from the website. Turned out, there were several obstacles she didn't know about:
1. Even though she spent too little on marketing activities, she got traffic of a very high quality — people were browsing the website actively. They obviously were satisfied with where they landed on but something held them back.
2. She didn't track any interactions preceding sales — phone calls and form submissions. She evaluated the performance of the agencies based on closed deals and disregarded the fact they didn't play any role in sales talks.
3. Out of all robotics toolkits on the first page of Google search, her offering was the most expensive. Actually, 3 times pricier than an average proposition of her competitors. Yet, she invested into marketing no more than 1/10 of a potential sale with hopes to get several orders monthly.
As a result, she blamed all marketing companies she hired for not doing their job properly.
Their actual misstep was in not starting with the research and strategy from the very beginning.
Marketing research is no less important than the one done by archaeologistsRush into marketing battles only after you understand who your competitors are and what marketing activities they are conducting along with your target audience' needs and buyer personas' desires. This way you will be able to send the right message to the right audience at the right time.
Check out Buffer's Marketing Manifesto in 500 Words.
#4. Heavy Responsibilities with No Decision-Making Privileges
Here's the trick: you won't get new results by acting the way you used to. Otherwise, you will be pleased with what you already have.
The best behavior in debatable cases about whether to go with some idea or not will be to avoid making decisions on personal opinions. Set up the hypothesis, execute it until you get enough data to check its viability and then modify or scale it.
Is many ways it's close to what Mitchell Harper meant when he said that "validating the demand is more important than ANYTHING."
One major manufacturer of mezzanines in the US got into the very same situation. Landing pages they used for online advertising were slow to load due to the resource-consuming image gallery. All actionable elements including the Get a Quote form and sales rep phone number showed up upon 3 scroll-down moves, but many users didn't explore pages that deeply.
Initially, the executives of that company did not support the idea of modifications on the ground that websites of their competitors look exactly the same and they are in the market for nearly a century to be perfectly aware of industry standards. Time passed, we were persistent and finally, they agreed to give one landing page a try.
Changing the way of doing familiar things may lead to new resultsAfter important page elements were repositioned to the first screen that people see when they land on the page and gallery was cut to one image to boost page load speed, the mezzanine manufacturer started getting more calls and quote requests. Traffic amount and budget spending remained unchanged.
Question industry standards for your own benefit. Do not nip marketing ideas you find unconventional in the bud — test them.
Finally
Marketing nature is quite complicated — its roots are buried in business environment marketing people are working in.
It is tempting to limit marketing outcome to the level of experience, skills and maturity of those constituting marketing teams, but that would be a big mistake.
3 First Steps To Take Right Now
Make sure you use Google Analytics and its tracking code is working correctly on all website pages.
2. Organize weekly meetups for all departments and let every leader talk about his/her problems and ideas.
3. Set up one marketing hypothesis monthly and test it until you get enough data to verify it. It can be something like "With the help of paid advertising in Google, we will get X sales from 1000 websites visitors (if user-to-sale conversion ratio is not lower than 1%).
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Source: You Will Always Be Disappointed with Your Marketing Staff If You Do Not Change This
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