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Marketing People Sucks - Get NEW ones NOW!

I have worked in marketing since I started working at age 23-24. The titles weren't maybe relating to "marketing", but the fact that everything you do in a company only serves one purpose, namely to sell, I believe supporting sales is what marketing is all about?

Many years later, I met a consultant explaining that all salespeople should consider themselves marketing people rather than salespeople, and then he substantiated this by saying. "You can't sell anything if a customer isn't ready to buy." and continued, "In sales, you can only address two types of customers. Those who have a defined need and those who haven't."

But what is the role of marketing? Marketing, in my opinion, has a couple of objectives. There is, overall branding of a company, and the services provided. Then marketing is also about generating demand for products. Finally, marketing is also about understanding the market. Marketing, sales, and R&D must be aligned with where the market is moving. The latter, of course, also relates to understanding competition, and the competitive situation.

So why do marketing people suck? Well, of course, most are probably more than OK, but there are issues that I would like to discuss. 

You know the term KPI. Key Performance Indicators are used to set measures. It can be, i.e. "Sales Revenue", "Cost per Lead", "Customer Lifetime Value", etc. KPI's are used when you sell or when you manage a company, and of course, also in your marketing. 

With the examples above, you could try relating this to your marketing efforts in your company. 

How is the branding of your company?Is your marketing messages aligned? Are your marketing messages and the quality of the same representative for how you want your company to be perceived? Are your communication aligned with the audience you want to appeal to? Etc.

Or what about, do your marketing people give you information so you can understand the competitive situation, and what KPI's you should use in your communication?

All questions are simple to ask, and the value of your marketing efforts can easily be measured.

Let's say you have marketing people that have been in your company for years, and your revenue has declined over the same time. Who should you blame? For publicly traded companies, the CEO is the one that loses the job if shareholders and the board lose faith in the CEO's performance, and the ability to deliver results. Internally the blame could be on sales, and I believe less often on the marketing people. 

There is a great saying; "If you do what you have always done, you will get what you have always got." So if the result of the company in our industry is free fall, you could ask yourself whether your marketing has delivered on the objectives I described above?

Of course, it's not always fair to blame the results on the marketing people, since it's often the marketing spendings that are reduced first when budgets are cut. 

One of the very sad developments I've seen over the past years is how the KPI's have changed. Let me give you some examples. A typical KPI could be; "Social Media Traffic (and Conversion Rates)."

Nothing wrong in either of the two statements in that KPI. Obviously, you want to know how many people are using your Social Media, and you want to know how they convert. You can argue that high traffic is an objective in itself, but you can also ask whether this number say anything about the value or quality of your traffic. If your marketing departments report the traffic numbers and not the quality of this, you likely focus on messages that bring you traffic rather than quality. Short videos, short messages, funny messages, over messages that are, well, maybe more aligned with your brand, the products you sell, etc. 

Looking at the conversions, you may ask the same question. Will anybody enter into a business relationship with you and your company based on a short, and maybe even stupid, short, marketing message? I doubt, and it reminds me of a cartoon that my colleague Henrik referred me. This is from the www.marketoonist.com website. As you can see, the marketing message on this pair of shoes is omnichannel, but the final purchase is made on a mobile device, which concludes that all marketing should be moved to mobile.

When marketing people in the printing industry trust that conversions on Social Media are important, I honestly question this. Social Media are, of course, different. Still, no printing company in the world will invest in anything based on Social Media campaign alone, so we need to understand why Social Media still is important in B-to-B marketing. If they "convert" from a Social Media campaign my claim is that it's because of things like trade-shows, influencers, specialists, trade-media, videos, reviews, user-events, and all the things that highlight why a specific product/service can benefit a customer. We are talking about capital investments in the thousands of dollars and not fast-moving consumer goods.

When trade-media are asked about reach, I sometimes wonder why this is important? Let's say an American trade-media send out a newsletter to 100.000 recipients. A percentage of these are large, some medium, and some are small printing companies. Some may be commercial printers, some may be textile, some signs, etc. All 100.000 readers are most likely spread geographically throughout the US. So when you send out a newsletter to all these readers, opening rates usually are quite low, and click-rates even lower. On the website www.campaignmonitor.com they claim that your opening rate should be between 20-25% and click rates as low 2-3%. But think about it. If your opening rates are 20-25%, but the reach is SO diverse, how can you even consider this value in itself? If you want to reach 100.000 readers, you can buy all the addresses from companies such as www.databaseusa.com. But will it work? Of course not. Look at your own behaviour. You may be one of those people that don't even answer emails written explicitly to you, so why should you expect your customers to open marketing messages from a trade-media?

Another thing on my mind is the channels we chose to use. Being in the printing industry is great. When visiting printers, trade-shows, and even some of the brands, you see amazingly great print. You see how tactile printed products appeals to you. You see how personalized messages appeals to you. You see amazing substrates, enhancement, and finishing solutions. You DO see companies using these terrific samples in communication and marketing. Still, unfortunately, both vendors and printers in general, and even more trade-media, don't use print in their own marketing and communication. You, however, even from the big companies, see hand-held videos, cheesy adverts, and web-pages that looks like being made by interns. Ask yourself - do the quality of the content and the execution of these "campaigns" support your brand? 

Your marketing should ALWAYS support your values. 

How much should you spend on your marketing? This is, of course, a completely impossible question to answer. However, the Texas-based marketing company FrogDog suggests that this should be in a range of 5% of revenue. The number is, however, strongly debatable since it depends on where in a company lifecycle your company is, and what you want to achieve. It is, however, interesting to see a suggestion like this, since this at least gives you a guideline.

How your marketing mix should be split, of course, depends on what you want to achieve. 

In my headline, I suggest you get new marketing people, and to be honest, most people that work in the same company too long often become a bit lazy, and a bit repetitive. I work with other companies in another industry, and all their print marketing is iterations annually. So I know exactly when to get X, Y, Z - and since this particular customer doesn't have strategic marketing people employed, they heavily rely on their current size in the market. Imagine what happens when a disruptor enters the market and start communicating in a way that may engage with the customers better?

This also applies to the printing industry. So seriously. From time to time, you need to throw everything overboard and start fresh. Please take a look at the smartest startup in your market segment, and see how they drive their marketing. I am quite sure they do things differently than in your company.

Some of these startups chose to startup and took a chance to compete with you because they found your product, your marketing, your prices, too attractive not to compete with. Do you feel the death approaching?

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