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We don’t know each other, so let’s become acquainted with a little game — a crowd-pleaser if you will — two truths, one lie. I will say three statements about marketing, and you have to decide which of the statements is a lie. Ready?
- Your marketing mix should be simple, succinct and integrated
- Every brand should have a strategy in place before go-to-market execution
- All marketing efforts need to be measurable and directly attributable to sales
It’s a little bit of a brain-buster, but if you guessed #3 as the lie, you would be correct. Why? Don’t you worry, I will explain.
In the marketing field, everyone has differing opinions. However, I believe there are a series of ‘universal truths’ about the industry. These are undeniably correct statements.
Related: 3 Common Misconceptions About Marketing — And How We Can Reframe Them
The first truth
For statement #1, this is the truth that simplicity is crucial in great marketing. This applies in many different ways, first from the perspective of your offering. People will get frustrated and leave if it’s too hard to understand or use.
Your offer’s marketing, messaging and user experience must be even simpler. Why? Because your customers — like you — are overwhelmed. The average consumer is responsible for making over 33,000 decisions a day on average. Unless you sell puzzles, the consumer doesn’t want to take the time to figure it out.
Think about it in the context of your own life: You have bills to pay, work to do, friends to see, and dinner to figure out. If you have to decide on a product or service you need, you want it to be easy. You might ask a friend or read reviews to guide your decision, but overall, you want to make the decision and move on with your day.
Focusing on simplicity in your marketing makes everything easier for the customer. From making your message clear and direct to ensuring that the path to purchase is seamless, you win more business by making your offer a no-brainer solution for what they are looking for.
Lastly, your marketing should be integrated. This is a fancy way to say it should be aligned and consistent and ensure your customers aren’t confused. Bust out that easy button and make it your marketing priority.
The second truth
The second statement may be a bit more controversial, but I firmly believe that going to market without a strategy is like going into battle with no plan. The risk is too high, and the potential for miscommunication and misunderstanding is far too great. Can you wing it? Sure. But why would you want to? Why would you put yourself in a position to ‘figure it out’ as you go when you can take a few hours and get it all down on paper?
Your strategy is your northern star when you get lost. It answers who this is for, why it was created and where you want it to go. With this in mind, you can make better, easier, more informed decisions each day instead of being locked into analysis paralysis about every new opportunity.
Furthermore, your strategy ensures others are all on the same team, working toward the same brand goals and objections. Your strategy can and should change over time, but having even a baseline “baby” strategy in place sets you up for higher, more sustainable levels of success.
The lie
And now we reach the lie: All marketing efforts need to be measurable and directly attributable to sales. This is a tough pill to swallow, especially from an operational and financial perspective.
As marketers, it’s been hammered into us to use data. Don’t get me wrong, I love it — we have more information than ever at our fingertips, but first, we need to resign ourselves to the fact that marketing does not equal sales. Yes, your marketing department should be a revenue-generating arm of your business, but it can and should be so much more than that.
I can’t tell you how many times I have found myself having to present metrics that don’t mean anything just to justify my existence as a marketer. In some ways, these numbers hold us hostage, and it’s the expectation they’re just going to continually go up, up, up over time. Let’s be real — we have all of this data, and most of it doesn’t really matter. We can tell you how long someone spent on your site, but not why they left and didn’t buy. We can tell you how many likes you got on your latest reel but not why it outperformed better than the rest. So much emphasis is placed on the ‘what’ and not the ‘why.’ Data can only get you so far.
Furthermore, so much of marketing is creative in its essence. Can you measure the number of people who laughed at your latest campaign or how many friends they told about it in real-time? Can you measure the joy you have brought or how much your offering has impacted your customers’ lives?
Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying don’t use data — I love data. I am saying stop chaining marketing’s hands to success metrics without meaning or direct sales figures that are outside their area of impact. You’ll end up with boring tactics like every single one of your competitors because they’re more concerned with making a quota than trying something new. The best marketing surprises—I want you to make space for that to happen.
Marketing can be such a subjective field. Ask five marketers what they think about something, and you will probably get five different answers. That’s what makes this industry fun and ever-evolving. I believe that when we plan appropriately, make it easy and allow success to look different than a metrics report, great marketing can flourish.
I don’t use the term lightly — but think about it. How much great marketing have you seen recently? Something that would make you stop in your tracks? I call it the ‘sea of sameness.’ Everyone says similar things because they are too afraid of what it would look like if they really were themselves and stood apart from the rest. You didn’t build a business to land here.
You want more from your marketing, and it’s not difficult to get it. If you aspire to something more, I encourage you to keep it simple, plan it out, figure out what really matters, and move the needle for your brand.
