Why most marketing is a waste of money

Every year enormous sums of money are spent on marketing products and services.

Due to the obfuscation or confusion of clear goals most companies are unsure of the return on investment they are getting from their marketing budget. Google and Facebook will gladly take your money in exchange for vanity metrics like impressions or views. That is because almost all companies involved in marketing, from graphic design agencies to ad facilitators like google, snapchat, twitter and facebook and even old-school channels like magazines and newspapers have a vested interest in making sure the metrics that actually matter are not measured. Its an entire industry built on hypothetical “brand recognition” that doesn’t bring in sales. Views and engagements are measured and “institutional advertising” flourishes without bringing a return on investment.

In effect you are up against a whole industry built around sustaining the “building awareness” and “getting impressions” myth. The truth is that most marketing doesn’t work, it might feel good to get thousands of impressions or build you brand, but in many cases it doesn’t actually drive sales.

Evidence that “digital marketing” can be a complete waste

In the summer of 2017 Procter & Gamble, at the time the worlds largest advertiser in the world with brands such as Ariel, Pampers, Braun, Old Spice sent shockwaves through the marketing industry. After cutting more than $100 million in digital marketing spend in the previous quarter the company saw little impact on its business. Some of the ineffectiveness was attributed to bots clicking ads and fake traffic. The news was a huge wakeup call to companies worldwide and was the first time digital ads were proven to be largely ineffective on such a massive scale. Procter and Gamble’s cheif executive said: “We want every dollar to add value for the consumer or add value for our stakeholders.” and “What it reflected was a choice to cut spending from a digital standpoint where it was ineffective”

Evidence that marketing can be the single most important growth factor

How did we arrive at this point in time? How can the worlds biggest advertiser cut $100 million from their diigtal ad budget and have it barely have an impact? Is all marting a waste of money?.

The answer is “No”. Lets look at a few companies built on marketing:

Da Beers Diamonds

Diamonds are not actually rare, and contrary to what the industry would have you believe, they hold no intrinsic value as for example gold or silver.

In 1888 huge dimond reserves were discovered in South africa. The chairman of de Beers, Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, foresaw that the over supply of diamonds would satuate the market and eventually drive the price down. By an amazing feat Ernest managed to control the worlds diamond trade and restrict the flow of diamonds to the world. There was only one problem: There was no real market demand.

Engagement rings were not widely adopted before the second world war and so Ernest turned to marketing to create that demand by hirering the agency N.W. Ayer. The agency’s game plan was simple: To create a situation where almost every person pledging marriage feels compelled to acquire a diamond engagement ring.”

Using the celebrity influencers of the time and radio and tv ads with the AdAge #1 slogan of the century, the agency managed to increase the rate of diamond sales 55% in the first four years from 1938-1941 and between 1939 and 1979 sales increased from $23 million to $2.1 billion

So marketing actually built a strong foundation for the $72 billion-per-year diamond industry and had one company dominating it for a good 80 years.

Hubspot:

The cuintesential modern software company.

Hubspot is a marketing company and we are about to get really meta here. Hubspot invented the term “Inbound marketing” to mean drawing customers to you via social media, content marketing etc. Hubspots rocket growth makes them the second fastest growing small and medium business software company ever to go public.

Former CMO of Hubspot Mike Volpe has said: “I cannot emphasize enough the importance of inbound marketing in our growth. The inbound leads are 50% cheaper and close 100% more than paid leads.”

From the beginning Hubspot went above and beyond with their content marketing, offering expert blog posts, webinars, ebooks and resources before it was the norm. their growth speaks for it self:

2 — What marketing actually works?

Marketing can be a jungle, SEO, PPC, SEM, and the acronyms just keep coming. The challenge as a business owner is to focus on a few channels and stay away from the frazzled aproach of trying to do 20 strategies at once.

“Dabbeling” in many strategies at once is a sure fire way to not see any results. So what tactics should you focus on in 2019?

Instead of meassuring views and engagement, knowing how much money you put in and how much money you get out should be the basis of any marketing strategy. It is the only way to a sustainable marketing strategy that puts money back in your pocket.

Email

Despite a steep downward trend in email opt-ins, openrates and engagement, email still reigns supreme when it comes to engageing your audience and getting conversions. Email has great leverage as you can use tools to automate some of process and personalize the content. Many brands would gladly trade their pinterest pins, their twitter likes and google ad impressions for only a fraction of those prospects email.

According to the DMA Response Rate Report, Email continues to be the number one digital channel for ROI. 54% of marketers stated that increasing engagements were their highest priority followed by customer acquisition (54%)TwitterLogo_#55acee.

A 2018 study by hubspot found that Email was the number 1 way they nurture their customers and 66% of marketers say email delivers ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ ROI https://econsultancy.com/66-of-marketers-say-email-delivers-excellent-or-good-roi-2/. But, 78% of consumers have unsubscribed from emails because a brand was sending too many emails. The challenge becomes to keep the emails interesting, keep delivering value, how many times have you unsubscribed from emails because of irrelevant, boring content?

Content

Content is a reflection of the value that your company is able to bring to the table. It is a taster of what is on the other side of conversion. It is no surprise then that blog content creation ranks only second to growing SEO and organic pressence.

Content can spark noteriety, engagement and links. Links is one of the number one factors google uses to determine wether a site should rank higher than the competition and thus content can be one of your best bets as both a new brand looking to get traction, and an established company looking to get more traffic and more conversions.

It is important to know that just because freemium trials and webinars came in last in the study it doesn’t mean that its not the perfect marketing channel for your company. As we will find in the next section webinars might very well be your perfect channel, ranking above the must-haves for any modern company above.

The take away is to not worry about the extreme amount of strategies and techniques out there. Make sure you focus on content and email as a base for your company before you you try other strategies. A modern company that produces valuable, unique and highly saught after content and has a great email strategy to boot is unstoppable.

3 — Finding the channels that are unique to your company

Once you have the above table stakes covered, it is time to bring out perhaps the most important tool in marketing: Testing.

Because every business is different some strategies will work better for certain companies than others. Your target market will prefer to receive your messages through a certain channel. Many business owners are part of the same target market they serve, so try and ask yourself or your target market: “Where do I receive marketing messages that I actually pay attention to?” also: “What content do I consume?”. Those two cuestions can bring up channels you hadnt even thought of, channels that you know you or your target market will respond to. Next step is to do a small inexpensive test in that direction to see if there is any immediate traction.

As a company owner or a marketer, you can never be sure to find the maximum appeal, or the best channel right off the bat, after all your target market is made of humans who behave like humans, in mysterious ways. As we do with our messages and headlines, we want to test marketing channels to find the highest appeal and the most effective channels for our business.

First step is to see what your competition is doing, not to copy their strategy, but to get a feel for the market. As in military strategy, no strategy can be made in isolation, you must know what your competition is doing to get people to buy from them and get people to listen to them.

Step two is to talk to your customer base, where do they recieve messages? Where do they take the time to consume content? What do they base their buying descisions on?

Step three is to take all that data you gathered and sit down and brainstorm, to help in this process we have compiled a list of 15 easy tests modern companies have used to gain traction.

Once you have gone through the list a few channels will stand out, rank them by possible impact and how easy they would be to activate.

3 — Conclusion

You know know the importance of staying away from the institutional advertising that sustains a large part of the $557.99 billion industry worldwide and you are armed with the tools to focus on the table stakes channels for any modern company. It is now time to do the tests in the worksheet to find your ideal traffic that is most likely to convert via the best channel for your target market. As we saw the right kind of marketing can produce amazing results. It can create a need from scratch, it can build whole industries and propel David to beat the Goliath’s of the world.

Are there any examples of unconventional marketing strategies you have seen work in the wild? Anything we have missed? If so we would love to hear about them in the comments below!