Marketing – more than meets the eye

It is easy for businesses and marketers to fall into the old trap of focusing on just the shiny bits of marketing. Like bugs to a light, the splendour of the sleek shots of the latest product campaign, the multi-million-dollar TV ad, or the popular hashtag seems to lead us to forget that it is not about the tactic used or our products, per se, but the customer engagement and ROI they bring to a business.

If you have worked in marketing for the past 5-10 years, it is likely that at some point, you were asked to make a campaign 'go viral', preferably using that 5-minute long, boring product video. This is just an example of the problem of the fact that people and businesses still associate marketing and, more importantly, its effectiveness with the tip of the marketing iceberg, the visual outcomes.

However, marketing is much more than just a series of tactics, and its effectiveness relies more on what is below the water than above. If the tactics used do not support the brand strategy and value proposition and do not deliver tangible outcomes that strengthen the brand, effectively target your audience and its needs, and drag customers to the bottom of the sales funnel, then what's the use of them?

Back to basics

A co-worker the other day told me that marketing is not brain surgery, and guess what? He was right! It's not. We just need to go back to the basics: engaging our customers on their own terms and turf, understanding and appealing to what's important to them. This means ensuring the messaging, tactics and mediums used applies to them, and are part of a holistic strategy that encompasses more than just the marketing department.

What we say

The reality is our customers couldn't' give a damn about the features of our products; they care about what they can do for them. And these days, when competition is fiercer than ever before and achieving product differentiation is a battle in itself, customer loyalty is built more on an emotional rather than just a rational connection.

It doesn't matter if you are in the B2B or the B2C space; at the end of the day, the target of your marketing are humans that will not do business with you unless they like you, you present your offer in a simple, easy way to digest – the eternal key rule of less is more - and you show them you can make their lives ‘easier’.

That's why content marketing has become such a popular trend because it allows you to connect with customers in a more personal way, and reinforces something that strong brands like Nike and Apple discovered decades ago: Marketing is not about your product. It's about your audience.

That's why Apple pays top dollars for a 38-second ad full of close shots of faces/selfies while Nike ads concentrate on showing inspiring images of athletes' perfectly sculpted bodies training hard under the rain.

Neither of these brands focus on the product per se because they know it is about the connection, about that feeling of "I can do it too," about making the customer feel we know what is important for them.

The reality may be very different. People may need to use a Snapshot filter to get a decent selfie and may end up wearing their Nike activewear to pick up their Domino's. And that is the beauty of their messaging, that it sells us their premium products without actually talking about them, and in the process, it has built a brand that doesn't have to rely on discounts or promotions.

How we get it across

Just like putting together a messaging strategy that truly engages customers is key to any marketing strategy, so are the mediums and tactics used for it.

Your marketing team may have jumped onto the video wagon, and why not? It has been one of the top tactics to use for the past 2-3 years! The team has produced a great video, one that effectively utilises those crucial first 8 seconds, one that will make Facebook users stop their 80km/h race through their feed. However, if your customers are more into written content than video or only have a Facebook profile 'for work', then what is the point?

Again, it is not about trends or the awards. Just because every other article in Forbes and Mashable is about AR and AI or you have an ad that won a Lion in Cannes, that doesn't mean your marketing is effective or that you should do an AR campaign.

Who we involve

Brands and, for that matter, sales pipelines are not built based on shiny tactics; they are built from the bottom up. They are built on the foundation of that huge part of the marketing iceberg that is not visible, that takes into account your customers, their stage in the product life cycle, and their feedback but also an integrated marketing approach that goes beyond the product. It is one that includes your brand strategy, your value proposition, and—last but definitely not least—all of the other players in your organisation who make that 'conversion' possible.

How many times have you seen a great marketing campaign being put together just to discover at the last minute that it cannot be executed? Why? Because no one cared to involve the IT team or the customer service team to ensure they could actually follow up the leads the way they were intended to.

As long as marketing is parachuted into the business strategy at the last minute, instead of being part of it from the get-go, we will never be able to celebrate those shiny marketing achievements without having that annoying little voice asking us: 'But do they really work?'

---

Originally published on LinkedIn

#MarketingStrategy #Marketing101