So You have Won an Award But….
Everyone loves awards, especially reputable ones from renowned associations.
Marketers love our awards for sure as it’s something that most of us probably toiled hard for and spent long hours putting together the campaign strategy behind it. But if you ask the business and start flashing the trophy in front of them, they might just go “erm good but where’s the sales?”.
In such a scenario, before you start conjuring up images of Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire saying “show me the money” and depending on what’s the reality of the connect versus disconnect between your campaign outcomes versus business outcomes, try asking yourself the following questions:
What else did I achieve in reality besides marketing outcomes like engagements, interest and conversions based on people who interacted with the campaign?
What did it really look like in terms of sales demand, leads generated for sales and/or sales opportunities, if not actual sales?
If it looks bad, why is there a disconnect between marketing and sales outcomes? Was it a product proposition problem or marketing positioning problem?
The truth is, marketing awards to me, having being a judge for a few different awards now, should be tagged hand in hand to business outcomes.
Marketers shouldn’t be winning awards for their own vanity but rather, the award is the cherry on top of the cake as a reward for a successful campaign that helped to achieve business outcomes. And these business outcomes in turn helped to solve customer problems and address their needs.
Else, you end up with a flashy trophy but still get hammered for not helping business to create sales demand and opportunities. And guess what, your marketing budget still gets cut at the end of the day as business still sees a disconnect between what marketing does and what business wants. Business would rather spend it on product research and development than marketing awards as such award submissions certainly don’t come cheap!
Marketers should therefore take greater pride in being strategic advisors to the business and work with them to strengthen their product and service proposition. Bring in a neutral perspective of the target customer and make sure it is a proposition that is compelling even to you. Else, no marketing campaign can salvage a bad product proposition.
Then, you can go focus on winning awards and actually take pride in it.
About the Author
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Ally and Advisor for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.
Who rules - Preference or Performance Marketing?
Companies who are still keeping two separate team strategies between performance and preference marketing are setting themselves up for longer term failure
Such companies are failing to connect the dots between full funnel marketing and over simplifying the consumer decision making process and mindset.
This is especially in the digital ad space where borders are blurred or non-existent and privacy settings no longer allow for precision targeting the way we desire.
Preference and performance simply should go hand in hand as end day, we don’t simply blow marketing dollars for the sake of it. What’s awareness to someone is consideration to another and conversion to someone else, depending on the decision making journey your customer sits in relation to the product or service and your company.
This is certainly not that new, when I went through the Google certification course back in 2019 but am still surprised that some are only talking about this in recent years.
What’s more shocking is the way some companies are still insisting on measuring marketing returns on investment by not having attribution beyond vanity impressions, page views and clicks on pretext that it’s just for awareness. On the other end of the spectrum is insisting that if a certain ad doesn’t result in immediate conversion, then it’s a failed campaign on pretext it’s for performance.
Whatever happened to looking at the funnel, who you really are trying to target, where in the decision making funnel they are at, how compelling is whatever you are offering, and ensure you are connecting the dots on your messaging in different formats, in order to determine the right metrics to measure at each touchpoint?
Example – this week, you have an ad talking about how xx product will help solve xx issue that customers face today. A few days later, you have another ad referring to the same product promoted on a site that your target customers frequent. A few days later, you serve up another ad that has a tactical offer with a buy by xx date.
Companies who know who they are targeting and who are responding to their ads versus those who aren’t, will create segmented lists that differentiate the two. They will use one for remarketing with differentiated messaging to help catch their target customers along the funnel with the above messaging and offer so they maximize their media budget. This process should ideally be automated.
Another critical thing to do is to try to get target customers to sign up and start a relationship with you, by giving them reason to of course through insights, tips or deals that matter to them, especially critical with the sunsetting of cookies.
This goes hand in hand with understanding their digital footprint so you have a multi-dimensional view of your target customers as real people with interests, preferences and needs, beyond outdated attributes like age.
All in all, companies need to invest in the full funnel and have different measurements for each stage of the funnel.
About the Author
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Ally for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.