Opinion: Why marketers need to climb the right ladder

“If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.” – Stephen R Covey. The purpose of marketing is to achieve business goals. The most common goal is growing revenue, but there’s a wide range of other goals. For marketing to be effective, you need to look at how well each activity contributes to those business goals. Thank you, Captain Obvious. Except, that’s surprisingly often not obvious in practice.&

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urprisingly often not obvious in practice.

In my experience, many marketers spend a lot of time on what I call “marketing-like activities”. I recently peaked inside a business that was investing heavily in content marketing. Content marketing can be a great tool and I’ve often recommended it – for the right company. But in this case, I looked at the data and despite taking up around half of the marketing team’s effort, it was producing a small fraction of the revenue.

They were producing decent content. They were reporting on it and measuring it. Doing all the basics right. It was a well optimised activity. They were climbing the wrong ladder really well.

Similarly, I helped out a financial services company who had decided to invest heavily in SEO, a channel I’m generally a big fan of. No doubt someone at the company had read some blog about how important SEO was. And for many companies it is. But for this company, the data didn’t add up. They had already made an investment at that point and it was an awkward conversation.

In my work, getting to peak into a lot of businesses, I’m surprised how many marketing-like activities I see. Things that look and sound good, but fail to move the needle.

Another classic one is “awareness”. Many marketers wave awareness around like a magic wand. Sprinkle awareness dust on a campaign and all accountability magically disappears! Awareness activities are harder to measure, but in my opinion, that makes the measurement of them even more important, not less. I always ask: who is aware? What are they aware of? How do we measure if that awareness was effective? If not, it’s just a marketing-like activity.

It’s always about asking the questions:

What is our goal?

How does this activity support that goal?

Is the time/money involved a better return than other activities to support the goal?

Our job is to achieve business goals, not to make noise which looks good in our company meeting but has little impact.

Stop confusing marketing with marketing-like activities. Make sure your ladder is against the right wall!