There are 60,000 of books about marketing in the Amazon catalog. It would take around 30 years to read them all!*. And the number doesn’t include myriads of blogs, webinars, courses, and podcasts on the subject. Marketing discourse produces more and more terms, trends, and people who want to make money on consulting you in the strategy they invented 2 months ago.
Admit it! When you hear people say, “Content is the king”, adding “And distribution is the queen” to sound oh so smart, you want to punch them in the face. Because it’s a cliché. Because it means nothing. Like “delivering value”. Or reaching for “low-hanging fruit”. Or “leveraging”.
We hear and see these expressions so often that we get used to them and stop asking about their essence.
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In the labyrinth of buzzwords and clichés
And yes, we beat our chests. We’re guilty of using them. Everyone is.
Think of terms and phrases such as:
- Omnichannel
- Multichannel
- Cross-channel
- Inbound
- Greenketing
- Thinking Outside the Box
- Engagement marketing,
- Growth hacking
- It’s time to put the customer at the center
- Agile
- Synergy
- Content is the king
- We’re not chasing bright, shiny objects
- WOMM
- H2H
- Age of the customer
[Read a great Brian Morrissey post on the topic, he lists some hilarious ones, like “Open the kimono.”]
Why there are so many of them? “[B]ecause marketers and marketing platforms are all trying to make themselves stand out in a crowded and competitive field. What’s the easiest way to get attention for a product? Say that it’s new, innovative, and disruptive”, explains Samuel Scott, Director of Marcom at Logz.io and a global speaker.
Each one of them promises originality and a shortcut to an easy gain. That’s what „hacking” is all about: to outfox the competition and bend the rules of the game.
Marketers often look for shortcuts and hacks.
The myth of content marketing
In other words, most of them either can be reduced to good old marketing mix and 4Ps or are plainly a mumbo-jumbo, as Scott wrote in his controversial article in TechCrunch. Let’s take a look at content marketing. Marketing has always been about content, about educating customer, crafting a message, and distributing it. Today we do it across different media (what affected the process) but still it’s not like content appeared in marketing a couple of years ago! And as a result of overuse of the term, we tend to overlook the fact that “content” or even “valuable content” isn’t exactly the same – or even close to – “great article” or “inspiring video”. You wouldn’t refer to “Fight Club” as “an excellent content”, would you?
Inbound: does it work?
The same is with the notion of “inbound”. According to Geoffrey James, it states false claims. Inbound gurus tell you that they “put the power in customers’ hands” (as if it ever was elsewhere), or that consumers make an educated decision based on information collected from blogs, social media and from influences (while it’s only one of many various modes of purchase decision making). Inbound is no panacea, the author concludes, and needs to be supplemented with traditional outbound strategies if you want to see results.
“The trouble is that there is rarely anything new in the field of marketing. Almost all of the buzzwords that marketers and marketing platforms create to get attention are just new terms for existing practices”, says Scott to sum up. Buzzwords only conceal, not solve the questions. And create a new generation of marketers who hack before they learned to play by the rules.
Big Data marketing: a revolution?
Do you remember John Wanamaker saying “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half” at the beginning of 20th century? Now, with all the analytical tools at our fingertips, we seem to be in the same situation.
One can choose from over 4000 marketing technology solutions (see Scott Brinker’s Marketing Technology Landscape). On the web, each customer action leaves digital footprints we can – at least in theory – record, analyze and interpret. Every single platform you use offers an analytical panel.
Still, in practice, marketers don’t have tools to:
- collect data from various sources and channels
- combine them into complex customer profiles
- translate them into deeper understanding of consumer’s behavior
- convert them into triggers of marketing actions.
The paradox here? Data is growing so fast that by the year 2020, about 1.7 megabytes of new information will be created every second for every human being on the planet. At the same time, less than 0.5% of all data is ever analyzed and used at the moment (source: Bernard Marr).
Such amounts of data aren’t actually helpful – it can lead to metrics overload, when you don’t know what to focus on and how to manage all the information. „[M]any marketers have been left with far more data than they know what to do with. 40% of respondents said they were struggling with multiple data sources,” writes Jack Simpson. Your consumers approach your company across many touchpoints and channels, they use various devices and Buyer’s Journey is no longer linear. Quantity isn’t the only problem.
According to DMA survey, just 21% of marketers say they are “very confident” their customer profiles are accurate and complete.
What to do?
The point of that post is not to vilify marketing experts and bloggers as producers of BS who manipulate poor practitioners. It was rather to draw your attention to hazards of relying too much on gurus and buzzwords, warn against neglecting the basics, and encourage to obtain relevant knowledge for your business, because knowledge empowers you. And with so many software solutions, platforms and options available, it’s easy to get distracted.
So what can we recommend?
- The more tasks at once, the more we split. Use fewer tools and invest in ones that offer complex array of features. Your software should be multitasking, not you. Avoid time-consuming switching between multiple systems and platforms. For example, choose one tool for Marketing Automation, Email Marketing and CRM. How easy and convenient it is to have all the data in one place!
- Go back to basics. Head to the library and read Kotler. Like, really. Reading a classic might be refreshing and help you see things from a different angle.
- When it comes to new solutions, remain skeptic. Ask for evidence and case studies, see data, test.
- Avoid buzzwords. Your customers and your supervisors don’t understand them and don’t care. They want results: relevant offer and revenue. No need to hide yourself behind words nobody can get.
- Adopt a scientific mindset. Focus on solid information and measure performance.
* We estimated that it takes 3 hours to read a marketing book (some are short and only get scanned, some are academic textbooks that consume way more time). We supported ourselves with the data from http://howlongtoreadthis.com/search_result.php?search_keyword=marketing&page=9
Then we assumed that our reader will devote 16 hours per day for reading, and will do so every day, with no regard for weekends or holidays whatsoever. It will sum up to 11,250 days.
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