The Seven Deadly Sins of Marketing
For marketers who want to be saints
Last week I was asked about the end of my last blog post by a smart friend who works in marketing. In it I wrote:
“B2C, B2B, Marketplaces, SAAS, Start-up, Enterprise… they’re all different and one size rarely fits all.”
To that, she threw me back a thorny question: is there any approach that almost every marketer, no matter the context, will warn against?
That got my brain whirring, and so here are, as I’ve learnt them, the Seven Deadly Sins of Marketing.
For the beady-eyed among you, a version of this post first appeared in short-form on my LinkedIn, but I’ve gone even deeper this time!
1. Persistence with the middle of the bell curve
I’m yet to discover a more important graph in marketing than the one below.
What does it show? While it’s obvious that you should pull back spend from everything that is not working at all (the left-hand side of the graph), what most people aren’t brave enough to do is stop spending on initiatives that sit in the middle as well.
In fact, the most dangerous spend is on the middle segment. We all know what these outlays feel like: they do OK, maybe even well, but they’re not needle-movers. Often they’re simply giving you the illusion of success. A classic example of this would be an event-led marketing strategy which is shiny and makes noise on socials, but delivers little to no new pipeline.
If it’s not delivering a payback period in line with the “great” metrics above, or at least obviously trending that way over time, it is money you could have spend on everything in the right hand segment; the bits that do work efficiently.
If there’s nothing you’ve done that belongs on the right-hand side of the graph, keep experimenting!
2. Underinvestment in CRM and content creation for existing customers
In this “Twin Peak” climate of high-wages and high-interest rates, businesses tend to face reduced free cash flow. More than any time since 2008, CFO’s are running the show. Budgets are being frozen or cut, and so fewer companies will spend on new vendors, with teams being tasked how an existing product or service can stretch further to do more. Net, it’s going to be a lot easier and a lot less expensive to sell more to existing customers than to acquire new ones.
That’s not to say you should give up on net new business, but it’s important to be realistic about where growth will come from in 2023.
The north star for most marketing teams is top-of-funnel pipeline. But right now it’s a sin to be ignoring already converted and paying customers who can re-join the top of that funnel.
As a seasoned marketer, who wishes to remain anonymous, once told me, for your expansion flywheel to spin faster “you have to both grease the wheels and remove the obstacles.” Greasing the wheels might be creating and sharing relevant case studies, hosting private webinars or building curated online communities that bring individual customers together. Removing the obstacles is setting up your plumbing and marketing automation properly so that customers are neatly segmented and engaged with that relevant content, invite or community.
As an aside, I agree with Kevin Yien that martech is about to have its fintech moment. So much new tooling is out there and leaders should be at the coal-face of innovation that can remove obstacles better than ever before.
3. Assuming you are too late to still-nascent channels like TikTok, Reels and podcasting
It remains possible that the biggest podcast or the most popular TikTok channel in 2030 will be started in 2023.
If you look at the rise of MrBeast to the top of YouTube: it takes consistency, thoughtfulness, hustle, and probably some luck too, but it’s a ~10 year journey that has culminated in an epic outcome.
It’s not exactly new to say that, “every company is a media business.” But I've come to realise that this is a lie. Most companies want to be one, but few actually ever get there... Why? They either assume they’re too late, or they’re unambitious. To qualify, you have to consistently produce best-in-class, high-authority output that only a genuine expert can create. So many people treat these channels as an afterthought, or have no clear strategic goal.
Are you building brand through a cult YouTube page? Improving SEO rankings now that young people search on TikTok? Enabling sales with thought provoking discussions? Absolutely use AI tools to streamline your internal content creation processes smarter, help you toggle with the tone of a piece, or add multi-language captioning, but remember you can't skimp on the quality and therefore utility of the output.
I liked how one post on LinkedIn succintly summarised the state of play:
“According to public information, the combined platforms (Reels, Shorts and TikTok) are getting at least *200 billion views per day in 2023* 🤯 The crazy part is that most large advertisers […] still don't have a strategy in place for vertical video. 2023 is a unique point in history where there's a huge arbitrage between the number of consumers on the platform -- and the number of businesses doing it right.”
— George Mack, Multiply
4. Thinking that paid social ad spend will always drive immediate CAC payback:
We are no longer in the glory days of Facebook and Instagram ads. Of course, if set up and executed correctly by a genuine specialist, they can be impactful. But you’re in for a nasty surprise if you see this a magic button in a post iOS 14 world.
If you’re wondering what’s going on, this timeless piece by Andrew Chen explains how, in the end, every once unsaturated channel becomes saturated as part of the law of shitty click-throughs.
The best marketers find green field space where they can be the first to exploit a channel - it’s why I was excited by BeReal. Even if the download metrics from Sensor Tower seem to suggest that they’ve lost some steam, you have to be on the pulse of new distribution channels, such as ByteDance’s new offering Lemon8. If you want to understand why I liked BeReal, check out this talk from WPP Stream a few months back.
5. No use of video:
Googling why video is important in marketing is a bit of a SEO minefield, but it ultimately comes back to what Andrew Chen put in his piece that I linked above…
Despite perceptions, there are still few brands using video as a core part of their strategy. Of course, if you survey marketers they’ll tell you it’s part of their plan, but ultimately in practice it remains peripheral. Why is that?
The first aspect is the time it takes to deliver a video. Everything from conceptualization to post-production requires intensive efforts and constant quality checks. Secondly, often, there is a dependency on stock images, which sometimes limits creativity. Some of them can be pretty expensive and drive up the overall cost. Lastly, the challenge with video as a content format is that there is little to no flexibility in updating it. In cases where the brand, product or solution is evolving, you must create everything from scratch, which further drives up budgets.
— Neha Gianchand, SVP Marketing, Straive
Developments in AI are changing all three of these; a quick shoutout to my old friend Daniel Verten and what they’ve built over at Synthesia. When you put this kind of tooling, now widely and inexpensively available, in the hands of seasoned video specialists, across those vectors of time, resources and longevity, there’s no excuse for it to remain on the sideline.
6. Confusing Influencers with influential people:
Social selling is basically all sales now. To quote Rex Woodbury in March 2022:
"I’m reminded of Discord’s 19 million (!) weekly active servers, +184% from 6.7 million a year ago".
Everyone is getting information from fragmented sources, hidden Slack channels, Discords etc. It’s imperative you work out where you buyers are lurking, especially the ones with clout, and meet/engage with them where they are. In B2B, everyone is influential even if they’re not Influencers.
In B2C, this power of personal brands and community-led influence leads me to what is going down in Social Commerce. Long story short… it's about to blow up, reaching ~5% of US e-commerce in the next 4 years!!
Platforms are investing heavily in this space:
"Shuffles — the Gen Z-focused collage-making app Pinterest launched in November — will be integrated into Pinterest’s main shopping experience. Customers can now make collages of different shoppable products, like assembling an outfit with four different products from different brands, and then buy them all straight through Pinterest. There’s been a 66% increase in brands uploading shoppable catalogs to Pinterest and a 70% increase in shoppable products globally over the last year."
— Glossy
And China - which seem to be 2-3 years ahead of the West across all marketing innovation - is leading the way in terms of Community-Group Buying. How does it work?
"A group leader in the same community as his/her customers creates and maintains a WeChat Group. Every day, he/she then promotes a selection of products to the group via a mini-app. Products are sourced directly from farmers, distributors and brands. The bulk order is delivered to the community group leader, who unpacks it for customers to collect. With the help of technology, these groups go far beyond the circle of just family and friends. They typically consist of 100-500 people located near one another, within the same community."
The sin here is to believe that Influencer marketing era - led by Instagram - has been and gone. The second wave - now the hype has passed - is here, and WPP’s acquisition of two influencer marketing shops in the space of one week speaks to this future.
7. Thinking you can sin and get away with it
If I had a penny for every time someone believed one or most of the above didn’t apply to them for some reason…
It’s a simple game really: you need to be top of mind in buying situations for your customers, and to do that you need to keep showing up in the online and offline spaces where they exist.
(Again, listen to the Mark Ritson x Louis Grenier podcast if you need this reminder delivered at length.)
The best startup marketers understand the constraints that exist and then play within those swimming lanes.