1. People hate being interrupted and broadcast (pitched) at

2. Brands don't matter - I don't care about you, your company, your brochure or your website

3. The only real measurement is revenue

These Are The New Rules Of Marketing

Let's go through them 1 by 1.

Interruption Marketing is Dead

We all hate adverts, we all hate marketing emails and we all hate cold calls.

So why do you keep spending money on this stuff?

Advertising was designed in 1930, cold calling in 1980 and email marketing in 1990.  Why in 2020 in a post pandemic world do you really think it's fit for purpose.

As one of our clients said recently "throwing content into a bunch of strangers, is not a way of generating leads".  It's not, we are better than this.

Stop Spending Money On Your Brand.

Why is there this fascination with brand?

If I call you up and say, I want 30 minutes to tell you about my company, what will you do?

Well I need to be pretty smart to dodge the ad-blockers, the technology blockers and the legislation blockers.  But nobody, that is nobody, is interested in your products and services.

The only reason you are is it pays your mortgage and puts food on the table.

... and of course, what sells things? Conversations. And your brand, your brochures and your white papers, your adverts, your cold calls and your emails ..... none of them, create a conversation.

Money is The Only Measure of Success in a Marketing

What on Earth Do Impressions, Engagement, and Clicks Really Mean? want to know? I explain in this blog here.

The Scary Thing About Marketing Today

I think that many marketing departments know they have a tenuous relationship to value within the business. I have a friend, a Marketing Leader,who still does email marketing and he says "email marketing does not work", but he does it because he is able to measure the response and he submits that to the Board to show that marketing is “doing something". It justifies his existence, nothing more.

In sales, I have to sell something to be measured, which is the way it should be. But my friend admits he gets a “pat on the back” for nothing, certainly nothing that will move the dial in terms of leads. 

So What About The Measurement of All These Impressions, Engagement and Clicks?

We were recently presented to that a marketing department had achieved quarter of a million impressions.  This resulted in a 0.5% download rate of a pdf. And this was being reported as a success.

I know that where I come from a 99.5% failure rate isn’t a success.

In the words of John Lydon (Johnny Rotten) — 'Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?'

Marketing Doesn't Work Anymore

My point is, in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king. Where an organisation is caught between what they did and what they know they need to do there is an area of calm water where nothing seems to be happening and I expect that this organisation is in exactly that place now. No matter which way you cut it 99% failure rate isn’t sustainable for any business and the sooner they recognise this the better or run out of cash.

The problem is though that in the move to social you can’t get a little bit pregnant. You have to make the decision and take the plunge. This company is hoping that the corporate-account-running-inmail-sending-automated-personalisation strategy will help bridge the gap between the old way of working and the new. But however much you want that to be the case though it simply won’t work. This marketing-run centralised approach has netted barely more than 20 new targeted connections, whereas the sales teams that are social selling have achieved an average of 500 new targeted connections per person.

The Role of Marketing

This doesn’t mean that marketing doesn’t have a role, but it does meant that marketing will need to take a different sort of role from now on. A role of guiding providing insights, empowering, stirring and reporting/measuring.

At a fundamental level there is a risk that marketing can end-up being seen as a cost rather than an investment because it used to be the case that marketing would create desire and qualify prospects and then those leads would be passed to sales.

And this worked because the buyer wasn’t empowered and because it was difficult to find who your competitors were and because there was no way of seeing whether you were telling the truth or not. “We are the market leader with 100% satisfaction guaranteed” would be a tough stamens to disprove. Now of course marketing is in many cases an additional step between the salesperson and the prospect that simply isn’t needed because the prospect can find the seller and the seller can find the prospect…

It was Peter Drucker who said “what gets measured, gets improved.” But it seems to me that these measures have been invented to try and prove that marketing is doing something.

Here we are in the middle of a Pandemic and we are burning through cash with little understanding of the modern buyer and what works in 2020 and that needs to change.

More great marketing stories, or even you want to sell and market like it's actually 2020, you can get mehere