Top process marketing mistakes

Russian text: https://teletype.in/@vowasemenov/topbad

For Christmas, I present to you my summaries of popular modern marketing mistakes: individuals and departments. This is the subjective essence of personal experience, repentance of colleagues and known mistakes of various gurus about the beginning of their path.

There are no pictures in the article: drawing infographics is lazy, inserting stock photos is hackneyed. Let there be music!

1. Run ads first, and then research your audience

The management often urges marketers to prepare a promotion plan, start a promo, launch an advertisement – otherwise, competitors will overtake! This is the most destructive thing that can drain your marketing budget and put your employees under stress.

Any marketing (advertising development, website design, banners or shop windows, working with reputation, etc.) should be based on a detailed understanding of the psychology and behavior of target audiences. Yes, questionnaires, interviews, customer observation, competitor analysis are the basis of any marketing process.

Audience portraits, CJM and accumulated test statistics will help you find cool marketing insights and outrun any competitors. Don't be afraid to inform your management about the importance of marketing research and argue your position – you are responsible for the results!

“Let's start first, and then we will explore the audience in parallel!” - it won't work. You will not have time for "parallel", so it is better to do everything at the beginning, and then gradually refine it.

2. Use personal experience instead of data analysis

Putting together a marketing plan and not having accumulated marketing statistics (where would they come from?), marketers put forward various hypotheses about their audience and the effectiveness of advertising. They decide for themselves what can work good and what not. If everything will be perfect – "I have told you so". If the results are bad, "it just didn't work, that's okay".

Always launch multiple creative variations and multiple target audience variations. Only A/B-testing will give you all the answers. Avoid personal experience: often the ideas that seem to fail the most at first glance perform best.

If you don't have starting statistics, be sure to include a "test season" in your marketing plan to check the adequacy of your theories. Let's go back to point 1: questionnaires, surveys, testing, and then specific and accurate conclusions. Technology makes it possible to collect and process huge amounts of data, the usefulness of which is difficult to overestimate.

3. Innovate because it's trendy

You don't need CRM if you have only 3 main regular customers and you work with government orders. You don't need Zapier if you have a small flower shop and only 2-3 main advertising channels.

4. Collect few statistics

It is impossible to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of an advertisement or target audience without accumulated statistics. It usually takes 2-3 weeks and tens of thousands of impressions to achieve statistical significance and draw adequate conclusions. In addition, all modern neural networks and algorithms strongly depend on this. There is no need to interfere with the working process every day, trying to improve it.

This also applies to all of your other advertising channels and marketing initiatives.

5. Exalting the tool over the process

It doesn't matter which email service you use, if your emails don't make any sense, have low OR, are overloaded with links and are sent 3 pieces per day. It doesn't matter what a cool designer works for you if you give him a technical assignment like "Draw a banner with a discount in Christmas style."

You don't need to rely on the magic of a new tool if you lack basic marketing skills and knowledge.

6. Promote perfectionism

This is the point about agile, MVP and all these joys. Don't try to bring the perfect product to market. Work with versions and improve them: release new versions, updates, patches in accordance with the feedback from the audience of buyers and the bugs found. Nobody expects a finished product from you here and now. Plus, obsession will lead you to never get done.

This flexible and consistent approach will help you win the competition and avoid wasted time and effort.

7. Do marketing by momentum

Previously, your company had active social networks, but gradually people stopped liking and commenting on your posts, organic Reach is decreasing every month. Your team also has less time to produce social media content. But you try to post at least something.

Why do you need this ballast? Take care of important current affairs, leave unnecessary and ineffective channels in the past. There is no need to cling to the old and make things sacred.

8. Делать все самостоятельно

Hundreds of books and millions of articles have been written about this, but once every six months or a year you need to stop, look around and ask yourself: "Have I taken a lot on my shoulders?" Hiring people, paying them, and working as a team is a very common basis for developing and increasing the effectiveness of your plans.

This point isn't just about expanding your team, it's about reminding you to analyze the situation and expand your team until peak workloads are reached.

9. Copy "giants"

If you have a small IT studio that creates software by order, then at first you will be tempted to imitate the first steps of the current IT giants: Google, Oracle, Microsoft ... You will want to find the secret of success and a special path that will help you beat all competitors and become a multi-billion dollar corporation.

This is totally wrong. Each business has its own specifics of development and conditions. The only property of a truly successful business model is flexibility. The rest of the set is different for everyone.

Therefore, you can spy on the way of thinking of successful market leaders, study cool marketing cases, but it's definitely not worth copying their actions directly.

10. Implement any manager's ideas

If you work in an office in a marketing team, then you probably had the following situation:

• your manager calls you or comes to the marketing department himself;
• talks about a "breakthrough marketing method" or "great insight" that needs to be implemented urgently;
• the marketing department takes over its head, puts all current business aside and implements the idea;
• the idea fails, the management blames all the sins of the marketing staff, who "didn't understand anything and implemented the idea in a crooked manner."

There is no need to quickly and thoughtlessly implement any insights and ideas of the leaders. Of course, all these things connect with good intentions, but here it is better not to rush.

Check out the idea. Ask additional clarifying questions. Analyze the market, if someone has already implemented it. Create a minimal working model, test it before implementation. Show the results to the management, give your assessment of the effectiveness. Suggest a refined idea, if possible. And only then take decisive steps.

11. Show excessive pessimism or optimism

If people around tell you that you can't find a balance in terms of evaluating creatives and results (either constantly criticizing or constantly praising), you should pay attention to this. It is especially important for any marketer to have a cold and adequate understanding of the current processes with an average score.

This will help to avoid resentment from employees and to fully present the results of work to management.

Only after finishing the article to the end, I realized that all these points relate not only to marketing, but also to management in general. Many things may be obvious and simple, but everyday work blurs the vision. Important principles and problems go beyond perception, and this leads to problems.

Thanks for reading and I hope you have found this helpful. Merry Christmas!