You have a marketing problem.
How many meetings have you sat in where people want to refresh the logo, redo the website, create a mobile app, build a Facebook page, get new brochures and more because they think that they’re having a problem getting their message through to their potential audience? The issue is systematic. Unfortunately, too many marketers think that they have a branding problem. That the message that they have is simply not connecting to an intended audience.
Maybe that is all wrong.
Before you go changing things, take a deep breath… a few steps back and ask yourself this:
- What is the path to purchase? Do you know how people find out about your product (or service), learn more about it, make a decision and then finally buy from you?
- Tracking. How much of that process are you both tracking and optimizing? Do you know your true conversion rates? Where these potential people are in your sales funnel? Are you constantly tweaking that tracking with a better understanding of what it costs to acquire a customer, keep them and their overall lifetime value?
- Fixing what you have. Before a redesign of your website, mobile app or whatever, what do you really know about what is going on? How well-versed are you in web analytics? What insights are you culling from the data and tweaking/testing to ensure that with every move, you are making it simpler for someone to transact with you?
- Telling your story. Have you truly leveraged social media and traditional communications to uncover the real stories of your business? The types of stories that people will actually want to find and share? Making the content that you are creating as shareable and as findable as possible? Or, is this still a world of frustration because the trades won’t pay any attention to your standard press releases and nobody watches those boring corporate videos on YouTube?
- Finding like. Are you busy chasing likes, friends, followers and plus ones and spending little-to-no time engaging with those who actually care about the industry that you serve? Are you expecting everyone to come to you, when you spend no time going to them and being active in their community?
Tough questions. True questions.
All too often people think they’re doing something wrong… or not doing anything at all. My experience (twenty years and going) says this: most people don’t know what they have and spend too much time doing the whole, "the grass is greener" thing. So, even if they keep adding and redoing, they’re still not doing the hard work of figuring out who is doing what and why. It’s better to point to something else, blame a logo, think the website is not performing or buy more advertising instead of truly understanding what there is, what is working (and what isn’t) and what has been done to rectify and optimize. Yes, marketing optimization has been on the brain lately. It’s mostly there because we (finally) have the technology, data and information to know. To know everything. To fix it. To do the right thing.
And so… let’s fix the logo? Or… let’s fix our marketing?
Mitch Joel Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.