At a fundamental level, a company has to make a decision about who their marketing is for: internal stakeholders or potential customers. In my experience this is the single largest divide between company’s with glossy/expensive campaigns that are just a waste of money and marketing campaigns that drive revenue.

Are you trying to drive revenue… or are you trying to get internal approval for your campaign? In the minds of many marketers this is the same question because we force them to answer both questions with the same assets… which is a really odd set of behaviors. There was a time when this made sense, when marketing department were forced to rely a single expense purchase of a repeated single asset, like TV commercials or magazine ads. But in the modern era of digital marketing where you can test ideas quickly and cheaply, uploading many permutations of the same phrase or image and setting spending levels lower than a fast food value meal for each version, those old school approval methods are frankly ass backwards.

This is what I call the Mad Men problem. People watch that show and the big scenes, the big moments are in the pitch to the clients. Why? Shouldn’t it be in the ROI calculation that happens the month after the actual campaign runs? Shouldn’t it be an actually increase in revenue for their clients that drives home how good their marketing skills are? But it isn’t, it is the pitch. And this is true inside companies as well. Convincing in the board is more important than delivering on ROI numbers that many marketers don’t like to calculate anyways.

This is all just ego stroking and hard truth is if the sales team and product team are doing a good jobs, the marketing isn’t too much of a dead weight loss, and the ROI is not trackable, then you can have marketing that is bad and still have a very successful company.

So let’s walk through why you should be concerned if you like your marketing.

1. Your customers are not a monolith. You are.

If your marketing is always in a consistent voice, consistent aesthetic, and consistent talking points… then there are lots of hole in your marketing. People are different and you service a range of customers so why isn’t your marketing just a diverse?

The answers to that is companies want to “look professional” or setting design standards. There are advantages to that approach but it also limits your marketing as it removes customers who have their own views on language, aesthetics, and which talking points resonates with them. I am not saying you should hate all of your marketing… but there should be at least some of your marketing that is not to your taste. If not, that is a warning sign on how limited the scope of your campaigns are.

2. You are not your customer

Customers don’t know your history, you have lived it. They don’t know your products/services, you are an expert in them. When you are viewing your own marketing, you are bring subconscious baggage into that conversation. Baggage that your customers don’t have.

You aren’t facing your customer’s problem. You aren’t paying for your products/services. You aren’t having to compare your products in only this super specific situation vs. alternative in only this super specific situation. Your customer is always going to meet your marketing with their own baggage and view points and that vantage point will never be the same as yours nor are they the same as your other customers.

3. You are not trying to learn the product or meet a need

Marketing is often practical, especially in digital marketing where capturing key technical phrases are core to gaining traffic. Yes, this is meant to be eye catching and build trust, but it is also educating the customer how your product works and why it is useful.

Super consistent marketing means you are not trying to reach all these different view points. Reaching those different view points often require different levels of technical detail and different assumptions about the technical knowledge of the customer. It can also mean directly address your customers frustrations and how your product solves those problems. This is a powerful marketing approach but only for a small slice of the market. Thus is a great piece that will strike out most of the time, but when it does hit it is a home run. The result of those facts is you need a large mix of batters stepping up to that plate.

4. “Like” is not a result

Marketers are often looking to sales or other informal sources of information to try and find out if their marketing is working. These…. aren’t great. The goal should be to calculate how well your marketing is working, not get a vague notion of good. Stories about “I like it” or “this one guy contacted us” aren’t enough to attempt a formal calculation. Yes, there are lots of reasons why you will not able able to make a 100% full proof calculation of ROI. But what you can do is try to calculate the minimal possible value and a maximum possible value and then try to reduce the ranger between those two down the line. Knowing that the value is somewhere between $50 and $400 for a led is far more valuable than knowing “this one guy contacted us”.

5. Who is driving your marketing: Management, Creative, or results from Customers?

When was the last time you started a marketing campaign by reviewing the results from the last one? When was the last time you launched a campaign because you noticed a weakness in the last one and you wanted to take a second swing? Are these what drive your marketing or are they driven by internal factors like product launches or events? This goes back to the original question at hand, is your marketing for your company or for your customers?

You may have worked very hard on the latest product or are very excited about that newest feature… but to a new customer it is all new. And even to an older customer, there are niches in your product line they don’t know. The problem with letting “new” drive decisions is it often puts the wrong thing in priority.