The missing ingredients in most marketing campaigns.

Are you are making the same mistakes?

Right out of college, I assumed that marketing was like baking a cake. You had to have all the right ingredients and bake it just right in order to achieve success. After over 15 years in the field, I’ve learned that marketing is more complicated, technical and much less forgiving than baking a cake. While baking a cake, a few extra dashes of salt or a slightly miss-measured cup of flour won’t change the outcome all that much. But in marketing, get something wrong and it might not only fail, but cost you big-time with your existing and potential customers.

In working with clients both large and small over the years from Microsoft to new start-ups, sadly, marketing is usually a game of dress-up using the latest “best-practices”, while graphic artists design for awards and personal satisfaction rather than for the target market.

In my experience here is how most marketing plans run regardless of the company size.

1. The CEO determines that they need to increase sales and he or she mandates that the marketing department (or hired agency) come up with a plan.

2. The marketing manager remembers having good success at his last job with a particular campaign and decides he or she will try it.

3. The graphic artist is charged with developing something clever. He or she remembers seeing a really cool design in last month’s CA magazine and he or she comes up with something clever.

4. It’s presented to the CEO and he or she makes a few changes that usually have to do with making the company look awesome. This is the point where words get added such as: “new and improved”, “unbelievable” and my personal favorite “unprecedented.”

5. The campaign gets the stamp of approval and some time after that it gets launched. Usually on a Friday afternoon.

The results are most always dismal and things just get worse from there as the bad taste rolls downhill from the C suite to the marketing department. When done correctly, marketing will be expensive. However, when done correctly, marketing will save your company. After 15 or so years in the field, here are 5 marketing ingredients that get missed or botched badly in most marketing campaigns.

Proper and adequate planning
Confucius once said “Life is very simple but we insist on making it complicated.” The same could be said for marketing research and strategy. Marketing planning consists of two very simple things, research and strategy. The single goal of marketing research should be:

• To understand the desires of the consumer.

The single goal of marketing strategy should be:

• To exploit those desires.

This probably sounds like an over simplification but if you take your focus off these two simple goals during the planning stage, you’ll miss your target, maybe by an inch, maybe by 1000 miles.

I love the movie Apollo 13 for its relentless problem solving. Running a successful, long-term marketing campaign is a lot like that movie. At one point in Apollo 13, the astronauts had to manually fire the thrusters in order to adjust their target for the earth since the computers were not able to be turned on. They quickly realized that an over-thrust of a quarter of an inch and they could miss the earth by 1000 miles. They made the successful burn by using the lunar module window and keeping a fixed target in sight, the earth. Not the most scientific approach perhaps but it was accurate and it worked perfectly. Sometimes during a marketing campaign, you’ll have to make ad hoc adjustments that seem to go against your research and company standards. But make them and you’ll be surprised (pleasantly).

I’ve never been a huge fan of traditional marketing research because it does not expose the truth. Beware of traditional research and the so-called “hard facts”. Research does not usually expose the truth; it binds you to it. The reason why research can’t be trusted is that people react differently when they know they are being watched and they spend hypothetical money very differently than the way they spend real money. You’re goal for research is to learn the true desires of your customers. Traditional research, focus groups and the like, support mediocre ideas and kills the really great ones. This is because it is very hard to ignore hard evidence or the numbers. The truth is, numbers do lie. You’ll be much better off relying on the soft evidence.

Soft evidence if the stuff you gather while talking with a customer or client. It’s the chat on the message boards and in the chat rooms. It’s the angry customer that no one wants to talk to. Don’t pay someone to form a group of hypothetical customers and ask them hypothetical questions. The best thing you can do (in the words of Harry Beckwith) is hire a boy to tell you what your emperor is wearing, and then listen.

Conduct proper and adequate planning. By proper I of course mean the soft stuff. By adequate I mean you need to know when enough is enough. In my experience, excessive data inhibits decision making. You’ll know you have enough data when new ideas start flowing.

I’ve also never been a fan of the so-called marketing “best practices”. Best practices assume that everyone’s company, products, services and customers are the same. They just aren’t. Create your own best practices for your brand. They’re the only practices that matter anyway.

Use what you have, especially the soft facts. You would be amazed at how many companies I have worked with who spent thousands of dollars on research (both hard and soft facts) and then did not apply it to their marketing strategy. Such practices are more common than you think. I’ve often illustrated this blunder to my clients by explaining that it is like dating the entire Dallas Cowboys Cheerleading squad and then marrying your sister. If you have the data, use it in your marketing strategy.

As I said before, marketing strategy is simple. Design a strategy that exploits the desires of your customers. However, that is often much easier said than done. More than anything else, this is where a seasoned marketing consultant can earn you the most money and give you the biggest bang for your buck.

Choosing the right vehicles
Unlike baking a cake, marketing is more like planning a trip to the moon. The most important thing when planning a trip to the moon is choosing the correct vehicle. As awesome as the Space Shuttle is, it could never get you to the moon. It just wasn’t designed for that purpose. Marketing is a lot like that. During the early dot com years, many believed that the Internet would be the end-all solution to marketing and that all other mediums were on their way out. Today, most would agree that assumption was ridiculous. While electronic marketing is very powerful it could be the very worst marketing choice depending upon your target market, the age of your company, and your product category (see my case study at: www.pinemountain.com/business_at_7x.pdf).

Of course planning your marketing strategy includes planning which vehicles to use. Notice I said vehicles plural. Few marketing campaigns work well with only one vehicle. Whichever ones you choose, make sure they work in tandem and build upon each other.

Choosing the marketing mix is where a lot of marketers go wrong. The reason for this is the basic human instinct to resist that which is unfamiliar. I love the saying that says, “for someone who only has a hammer, everything else looks like a nail.” For the marketer who only knows direct mail, every marketing need looks like a postcard. For the marketer who only knows trade shows, everything looks like a booth and handouts. Hiring a seasoned marketer can also go a long way in helping you choose the best marketing mix not just the marketing vehicles that are familiar to your company. Chances are, an outside voice will have ideas and methods that you’ve never considered and never thought would work with your company or product. And chances are, it’s just what you need.

Crafting the right message
Writing effective marketing copy and marrying it with the right creative elements have never been an exact science and I doubt it ever will be. Try as we might, despite the number of consumers we talk to and the amount of money we spend on research, creating the “right” delivered message is an educated guess. However, there are some rules that when followed, you’ll never be too far off the mark. Think of this as the fixed object in space while burning your thrusters.

1. Speak confidently, make your clients believe they will be satisfied, and they will.

2. Beware of what your price says about you and your product or service. If consumers come for your price only, they will leave you for someone else’s.

3. Be descriptive. Create an offer consumers can see, taste and feel.

4. Make your customer sound important not you.

5. We are all attracted to beautiful things. Make your marketing and advertising beautiful… Build a prettier mousetrap.

6. To make and keep a sale, make and keep a powerful connection.

7. Build trust and consistency in everything you do.

8. Get to the point strongly, confidently and immediately or you won’t get heard. Our time is extremely limited, especially when it comes to being sold to.

9. Be sure your customers know what you do for them. In the consumer’s mind, they sacrifice a great deal to do business with you. Your sacrifice for your clients, cements your clients to you.

10. Whatever it is you do, do it passionately. Passion is worth billions.

11. Keep it simple. One message per communication.

12. Keep it real, keep it human.

This last point requires some in-depth discussion. Whatever marketing deliverable you create, stop and ask yourself, “Would I stop, listen and pay attention?” This is often a difficult question to answer since we all have a self-bias. One thing you can do to help ensure your marketing is being read is to make it real and human.

As humans, we are naturally attracted to human drama and stories. Think about the most recent news casts you remember over the last few days, weeks or years. Why do you remember them? Why did you pay attention in the first place? Chances are it was because of the human element. The biggest trick to marketing is to make your product as tangible and human as possible. When you think about the very successful ad slogan “Intel Inside”, it’s guaranteed you’re not thinking about a central possessing unit that is able to chunk down trillions of 1’s and 0’s per second. You think about a powerful blue thing in your computer (that isn’t really blue) and that it’s your only assurance that your computer will work well, process your pictures and the video of your friends. As you analyze all good ad slogans, you’ll find they humanize the product or service. Keep it real, human and relevant.

Social marketing and Web 2.0 are the latest buzz words in today’s marketing world, both of which are strategies that center on the human element. For those who don’t know what Web 2.0 is, it’s a fancy way of saying, “using the web to socially market one’s products and services.” Web 2.0 and all the social websites like Facebook and Twitter are wildly popular because of their human element. The free exchange of stories and ideas fuels the millions of memberships on such sites globally, with numbers still increasing. Interestingly though, when you spend time on any of these social marketing websites, you’ll find much of the conversation is one-sided. People love to talk about themselves. To be successful in this online space, don’t talk about yourself constantly. Make your customer sound important, not you.

Execution
I only include this as one of the most frequently missed ingredients because I’ve seen it botched so many times. What would have otherwise been a beautifully crafted marketing campaign melts down on the launch pad because the webmaster failed to test the website in multiple browsers and everyone using Firefox got a blank page, or the direct mail piece wasn’t sent 1st class and the dated material arrived too late; both of which I have seen during my career.

When marketing is done right it is perceived as a service to the recipient. Remember this when crafting your message and designing your sales strategies. Whether or not your marketing was a service to the recipient will also heavily depend upon your product delivery. Therefore, execution also includes making good on your promises. We’ve all had the experience of speaking with a salesman who doesn’t know about the special pricing. Execution also includes delivering what you claim. If your product doesn’t stand up to your claims even just a little bit, your marketing campaign will run your business into the ground faster than anything else.

I once had a colleague who thought she’d try her hand at Internet dating. Not long after her bio was placed online, she was taking an all expense paid trip to Seattle to meet a special someone. Monday morning, she was back in the office tearfully explaining to her girlfriends how terrible and rude her date was. Being the inquisitive and curious type, I took a look at her profile online and I found what I expected. My friend was not the most slender of women, but was still attractive. However, her profile put her 30 pounds lighter than she was and her picture was at least 8 years old. We all seem to have a tendency to make ourselves (and our products) better than we really are, or at least present us (and our products) as we see ourselves. This is where the hiring of a boy to tell us what we our emperor wearing is extremely valuable. The story of my colleague does have a happy ending however. I helped her take some nice digital pictures of herself and I wrote her a bio in a second-person voice as a friend, focusing on her real qualities. She was very kind and sincere, with a funny disposition that made you want to talk with her. She was dating regulating at the time I left the company and very happy.

Whatever you say about yourself, it had better be accurate or you will be hurt by it, guaranteed. And whatever you do say, make sure you can deliver.

Lastly, before you get to the moment you push the launch button, make sure you have buy-off from all the stake holders. Also make sure that the launch button isn’t being pushed at 4:45 on Friday afternoon. The best day for a marketing launch is on a Tuesday. Stick to that day like glue unless you have very good reasons for choosing another day.

Repetition
A hit-and-run approach never works in marketing. A hit-and-run approach never works in marketing. I’ll say it one more time. A hit-and-run approach never works in marketing. The most common denominator among all inexperienced companies when it comes to marketing is their ignorance to this marketing proverb. I can’t count the times I have sat down with a new client and they tell me of this other agency they hired that didn’t do anything for them. As I dig deeper, I often find that they spent the time and effort to produce a campaign only to kill it before it had a chance to breathe. The hard-line CEO stipulation of “we’ll try this only once, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll kill it,” is always a self-fulfilling prophecy. More than once in these situations, I have only made frivolous changes to the marketing campaign and mandated that it run X number of times and my clients are amazed. The truth is repetition and consistency is the real magic.

Whenever repetition is brought up in marketing negotiations (whether spoken or not) the feeling is that the agency only wants to repeat the campaigns so they can increase their billings. While this certainly works in the agency’s favor, it is not the sole reason. Consider the following example.

You have a qualified marketing email list of 1000 names who have agreed to accept email from you. You craft an intelligent message about your new Intellisoft Mattress and blast it. After a few days you check the visits to your website and you only find that your visits increased by 4 people. The campaign might be labeled as a miserable failure and the agency would be fired. But consider this. Even with the most qualified list, consumers do not sit and anticipate your email nor do they drop what they are doing to run to your store. What do you think the chances are that any of the 1000 consumers on your list are in the exact right place, ready to make a mattress purchase when they receive your email? It’s probably less than 1 in 1000. So what does this mean? Two things:

1. Get a bigger list (and perhaps a better qualified list) and increase your odds of hitting consumers at the right time.

2. Increase your frequency.

Rarely do consumers and marketing messages meet at the right time, but it’s the company who advertises frequently that gets the sale. Why? Because when the consumer is ready, the company who has remained top-of-mind will get the sale. They will be the first company the consumer thinks of. Most company CEOs know this rule but they also think or at least hope that they can out smart it, beat the odds and save money on advertising. The truth is you just can’t.

Many companies start thinking about marketing when sales are sagging and then get frustrated when their marketing plans don’t produce on their immediate time frame. Marketing not only requires time to effectively produce but also time to perform. It’s impossible to know but I would wager that at least half of all marketing plans fail because they were cancelled before they matured. In our world of immediate gratification, we sometimes forget that like the harvest, we have to plant the seeds, diligently water and cultivate, and be patient. The farmer who pulls the plug and harvests in July, will starve come September.

The sales cycle is different for all industries but I have found that from the launch of a marketing campaign, to campaign exhaustion is on average three months (one month for online campaigns). This means that whatever you’re doing, you should repeat it every one to three months. Sadly, what happens all too frequently is when the economy becomes uncertain, the marketing team is among the first to go; the very department that can improve poor economic conditions.

If you’ve ever pumped water from an old water pump you will remember that you don’t get water on the first push of the handle. In fact, you won’t get water after the forth or fifth pump. If the pipe from the well is very dry, you might have to pump that handle dozens of times before water appears. I’ve seen dozens of companies stop pumping before water appeared and dozens more stop pumping when a high and dry economic forecast is made. Successful and seasoned marketing-oriented companies have learned that you always have to keep pumping, because if you’re not in the face of your customers, you are in fact out-of-site, out-of-mind, and invisible.

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About the author

Greg Meyers is a veteran marketer and business developer with his thumbprint on hundreds of campaigns and online properties. He has been a principal of several online marketing firms and has consulted for such clients as Hewlett Packard, Novell, General Motors, Volkswagen/Audi, Platronics and Microsoft to name a few. He is currently the president (ranger) of PineMountain Marketing (www.pinemountain.com). Forward comments and questions to: gmeyers@pinemountain.com.

© 2009 PineMountain Marketing LLC., all rights reserved.

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