Costly Marketing Misconceptions

Before you can begin your journey to great and sales-driven marketing, we should first take a look at what marketing should NOT be about (even though for many marketers it is ALL it is about).

Great marketing is not about…

• Getting the word out there
• Creating awareness
• Being memorable
• Building your brand
• Getting likes
• Getting your name out there
• Sponsoring your local football team
• Taking clients to the Rugby or Cricket
• Generating more and more leads
• Creating ‘hit’ campaigns
• Being clever or funny
• Going viral
• Vanity KPI’s
• Winning awards

Now of course, it can be argued that some or even all of the things on this list ARE marketing. I’m not going to argue against that because of course they are, but only for a certain type and size of business.

But, for the owners of a typical SME (small medium enterprise) they are NOT the things that will drive their business forward, they are not the ‘best’ marketing activities – the ones that deliver profitable new clients and keep them forever.

And there are two major problems with having a mindset that thinks these are the marketing strategies that you need, that they are going to make all the difference…

Problem #1

The first problem is that most of these (at best) are the equivalent of a hit single. What’s wrong with that you may think – that’s success?  

Well, there are some things wrong with a ‘hit’. The first is that most become ‘one hit wonders‘ – they are a brief flash of excitement, that usually cost more to create than they ever make back.

The second is that it’s the wrong kind of success. It’s far better for musicians to create a timeless ‘classic’ than a short-lived hit single. The classic brings in royalties for many years to come, long after the effort, expense and investment in creating it has been repaid.

Great marketing should be about creating a ‘classic’ rather than a ‘hit’! It should work for years to come – reliably, consistently and profitably. Most of the things on the list above are simply hits – if they work at all of course.

They are ‘nice to haves’, not ‘must-haves’. Therefore, they are a luxury – or maybe an expensive indulgence.

Problem #2

Big business marketing success rarely (if ever) translates into SME Marketing success.

Let me explain why we get sucked into thinking that things like awareness, getting our name out there and building the brand are so seductive and feel like the right thing to be doing, when they are so damaging for the vast majority of SME businesses.

Several years ago this article was published in the business section of The Times – it was about the (then) Norwich Union rebranding as Aviva.

At the time this was a very high-profile advertising and marketing campaign – including Ads on TV with stars like Bruce Willis.

Let me pick out a few paragraphs from this article that demonstrate what’s so very badly wrong with this marketing mentality and then explain why this thinking infects us all.

In the article, it says…

“Aviva, Britain’s largest insurer, refused to put a figure on the cost of the whole process but said that brand awareness of its name change increased from 35 per cent of its customers to 80 per cent within three weeks of the adverts being screened.

Paul Rowlinson, Investment Director of audiovisual media at Mindshare, a media buyer within the WPP group, said that Aviva probably would have spent £30m on advertising and marketing by the end of May. This could easily rise to more than £80m by the end of the year”.

To sum up, he says, “It is massive. Aviva is one of the biggest buyers of the last two years. If you put enough money into the market, and make enough noise, it will move the needle.”

Now, what we’re talking about here is a company that spent £30m at the point of writing, and potentially up to £80m, to move the needle. What needle were we talking about?

Awareness. Brand awareness.

Copying Big Businesses Could be a Big Mistake

These are all big company luxuries – for the rest of us, it’s a different world.

In fact, it’s even worse than that – if we try to copy the big boys, our thinking will be flawed, our decisions constantly wrong, and our marketing will be an expensive, and costly failure – doomed by trying to copy success (but of the wrong sized businesses).

For a company like Aviva and other big brands – this ‘big bucks’ stuff works. For businesses of that size, with those massive budgets and access to mass media it is true – if you put enough money in, you can move the needle (if you spend it wisely).

But we are SMEs – small, medium sized businesses. Most of us will be turning over a few million, some a few tens of millions and some hundreds of millions.

How many of us have £80 million to spend to promote a change of brand?

How many of us have £8 million? Eight hundred thousand? Eighty thousand? Or maybe it’s more like £10,000, £20,000 or £30,000.

So, we’re a long way away from that world. We must ‘move the needle’ with far, far fewer resources.

Moving the Needle in a SME

The big problem here is that business owners and managers are exposed to these marketing ‘success’ stories, the marketing graduates (that you may hire) are taught about them at university and they are used as case studies in business schools.

It is easy to form the impression that we need to adopt the same thinking, the same approach, the same techniques – when nothing could be further from the truth.

What I want to do is to expose some of the myths we’re taught about marketing, the dangerous myths. The reason they are dangerous is that they’re not myths at all; they do work. But they only work for the big players, and only for the really big players.

As an SME, we don’t have a hope of being able to replicate that kind of activity, that kind of ‘noise’ and that spend.

What we need to understand is that stuff doesn’t easily transfer to a company like yours and mine, where our profitability over the next quarter, our growth over the next 12 months, will depend on…

• the number of leads that we generate
• the quality of those leads
• the conversion of those leads into profitable sales
• the continuation of those contracts and those relationships into multiple years’ worth of profitable business
• and the price and margins that we achieve for the products and services that we supply to those customers.

This is ‘moving the needle’ in our SME world.

We really don’t have too much time (or money) to spend creating awareness, getting our name out there or ‘going viral’. It’s a different world that we operate in.

Very different.

For you and I, the danger is that we look at what those big businesses are doing and try to apply it to our business – only to find that it doesn’t work for us.

Yes, marketing case studies may inspire our marketing team (business school trained grads) and they may come steeped in these big company success stories, but…

The big lesson is that these case studies are NOT RELEVANT to your business.