Mistake made: When I was a marketer for a now major (then much smaller) software company, I was part of a team that was approached with an interesting project. Our leadership had discovered some unspent marketing dollars at the end of the year, and wanted to experiment with a video they’d hoped would go viral. This was in the early days of social media and YouTube, so the concept of content ‘going viral’ was a new phenomenon, but companies were desperately trying to understand and do it.
My team created a video that we thought was very funny, and were sure would get a lot of shares and drive visits. It was risqué and provocative and involved partial nudity – you know, all the key ingredients for a piece of viral content. When we presented the final video to our CMO, he was horrified. He gave us a very firm ‘no’ and made it clear that the video was not to be released. We were hugely disappointed – we felt we’d completed the task as instructed.
Lesson learned: Looking back, I now recognise that our CMO made the right call. In our pursuit of being provocative we took it to the extreme and made a video that could have resulted in a public backlash against our very professional, serious B2B brand. Still, I think that our instructions were flawed. Creating controversial content probably wasn’t a smart move for an enterprise-focused brand, and instead we could have invested that money into incremental marketing efforts that had a smaller, but ultimately more predictable, return.
I think this is one of the biggest mistakes marketers make today: approaching marketing with a gambler’s mentality of hunting for big wins, rather than relying on an approach built on data, consistent growth and predictable returns. Social media has exacerbated the problem; ‘going viral’ has become the goal of many marketing campaigns. Ultimately, social media users are picky about the content they share: if something screams ‘marketing’ they might reject it, but if it’s not provocative enough, they won’t notice it.
When you run smaller, strategic campaigns that target audiences with relevant messaging, you can use those campaigns to collect data about what resonates with your audience and what doesn’t. That means you can continually refine and reinvest in the most effective efforts without wasting time and money on what doesn’t work. We all dream of making a hugely successful, viral campaign, but ultimately small and measured efforts are the smartest bet for savvy marketers.
Mistake made: Many moons ago, in the early 2000s, I was working as a web projects manager and was responsible for relaunching an entire company website. We had a phasing site and a production site, but unfortunately the team didn’t think properly about go-live day and how it would work technically. What ended up happening was that every revision was going to the production but wasn’t being released, and we didn’t fully realise until go-live day. The upshot? All placeholder content was being posted live. Live! I remember being completely horrified while frantically refreshing over and over again: all I could see were boxes with ‘blah blah blah’ typed into them. It was a nightmare! Thankfully, the senior executives didn’t notice it, which was really lucky. It could have definitely been a lot worse!
Lesson learned: I guess I learned two major things. Firstly, the valuable concept of marketing placeholder content and not just using ‘blah blah blah’. I was also hugely relieved that Twitter didn’t exist back then! We all do things to be internally funny, like including certain jokes in placeholder boxes to make other team members laugh – in every case these jokes are not intended for the cold light of day. Secondly, it made me think we should sit through and talk through any big launches before a go-live day or indeed an event – it’s all about preparation, after all. We’ll never catch everything but it’s good to have a clear idea of what’s happening and how it’ll all look on the day.
Mistake made: My biggest mistake was believing that at a ‘first approximation’ there was a relationship between overall traffic to our website and the conversions of leads that came from that traffic. In other words, assuming that all traffic was good and was producing a share of the lead volumes fed into our sales system.
Lesson learned: There’s actually a huge difference in the quality of traffic that comes to your website from different sources, and it’s critical to understand more deeply the link between the source of traffic and the *quality* of the traffic. The key to understanding this is being able to track website visitors in more detail, to see them across multiple visits, to link them directly to their source, and to track beyond the website to actual lead generation and then follow-up sales interaction.
By going to this next level of detail in our tracking we’ve been able to identify ways of spending digital marketing investments that produce an ROI of perhaps 100 times what we were getting when we just made the assumption that traffic = leads ‘approximately’…
Mistake made: My biggest marketing mistake was thinking that social media was ‘just for the kids’. Obviously I no longer believe that, but as a non-digital native who grew up when phones had dials, the advent of social media didn’t look like an immediate marketing opportunity. My first reaction was always that there were better ways of generating traffic and better ways of generating leads. Search, paid or organic was always the primary means of getting both – and social didn’t seem to fit in. It was where ‘the kids’ went to get their kicks.
Lesson learned: Of course, I knew that was wrong but I also had an idea that many businesses and brands were getting social wrong too. If you see social media as ‘just another traffic channel’ then you’ll see it in the wrong light, and this is where I was coming from: it’s not a traffic channel, it’s a destination in itself. So, I went away and re-learned social media, chucking out all of my preconceptions and starting afresh.
I started to see social as a branding opportunity, and seen from that point of view, I was looking more critically at Instagram and Twitter feeds and the choice of brand palettes and filters. I was looking more critically at the language used across different Facebook feeds, and how businesses were talking to customers directly. I also started to see social as a positioning opportunity. Rather than broadcasting for traffic, it’s a chance to position your brand on issues and define where you stand in relation to your marketplace. I almost started to see marketing opportunities in Snapchat. So, I was wrong – social media isn’t just for the kids – it’s also for brands.
Mistake made: For me, underestimating the time and energy it takes to gain cross-functional consensus is the biggest mistake that I’ve made. There’s often an assumption in marketing that other departments know where we’re heading and how marketing programmes link to business goals. Spending enough time getting everyone on board with our vision can prove a major advantage later on down the road. There also seems to be a feeling that every marketer should be a master of all disciplines, from data analysis and demand generation to advertising. This can prove quite daunting, especially when you’re first starting out.
Lesson learned: I realised I needed to clearly articulate how our investments were impacting business. I’ve learned the benefits of stepping away from leading with just marketing metrics and comparing results to others considered ‘best in class’. Yes, marketers should look at what others within the industry are saying, but it’s important to step back and take your own route. For me, it’s all about figuring out the most useful business metrics for my company and focusing on these to be successful.
