Five Paths To Terrible Marketing

A good friend of mine is a DJ for a college radio station, and needed a theme for her set before an upcoming fund drive. On a whim, I suggested "Love Songs For Terrible People," because the kinds of challenging singer-songwriters that make me happy tend to go in that direction. She's taken the suggestion, and the set will happen this week. Happy to help, really.

As I took my dog out for his walk this evening, I started together my own play list of songs that would meet the criteria. Then, I had the small thought; what would tips for terrible marketing and advertising pros look like? And the suggestions came even faster than songs. They include...

5) Focus on single metrics only.

Do you do banner ads? Concentrate only on click rate. Email? Only open rates matter. Radio and outdoor are wins if you can track the placement to call center volume, business reply cards to mail-in reply rates, and so on, and so on. Anyone that tries to discuss complexity in these matters is clearly trying to disguise weak creative, or some other issue. The world isn't complex, and marketing success or failure is all about making one magic number move.

4) Aggressive short-term strategies are totally worth it, especially in online.

Hey, remember that magic metric stuff? Let's spike your click rate. No one remembers things like fake close boxes, Windows-style UI, clickbait treatments and other gray / black hat moves. Plus, the Internet is filled with easy going people who never complain about anything, and aggressive testing just goes down the memory hole. You also totally won't lose clients and staff over this sort of thing.

3) Testing is for the untalented.

You just know this is going to work, right? So much so that you don't need to isolate the variable, get a clear sense of the impact moving forward, document the findings to convince other clients to roll to the winning practice, and so on. Don't let anything slow down the speed of your genius! (Including hidebound concepts like statistical significance. That's just for academics.)

2) Ignore the history.

Hey, it's a brave new world where all of the rules have changed. Social media isn't anything like social media of the past, mobile won't follow a similar path to desktop and laptop, and the fragmentation of the audience that's been proven out in broadcast doesn't have any impact at all on your business. Oh, and seasonality is for offline. Has no bearing in what you do.

1) Your industry is unique, and has nothing to learn from other consumer categories.

Your customers are very, very special snowflakes, who never overlap with other demographic rules of the road, and consequently, can only be spoken to in the way that they've already been spoken to. (Shame, really, we might have been able to do something creative.)

Anyway... hopefully you've gotten the point by now. Marketing is actually very complex, because the world is complex. There are very few marketing mediums that work in total isolation, with no carry over or other considerations. Direct response in any medium is great, but if it doesn't convert well or profitably, you're not going to have a business pretty soon. Making everything simple works only if you can get everything down to an ROI metric, and even then, you have to judge in context to opportunity costs, and with the likelihood that less trackable channels are not getting enough credit.

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Got any other paths for terrible marketers? Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.