Fire your marketer now
Marketing strategy
Ask three questions to assess them
Wrong marketers or marketing agency costs money, time, and effort. Some examples of wrong marketing are spending on trends such as social media advertising or undue focus on social media engagement. 62% of small businesses fail to reach the target on Facebook. Fire such marketers or agencies.
Every business owner cannot be a marketer. But, every business owner can ask three things to assess the marketing strategy, marketer, or the agency.
1. Who is your target
Most businesses assume demography, attitude, and behaviour of their customers. Instead of assuming, always ask for the specific insights about the customers. Marketers and agencies without the consumer research are useless.
Knowing customer segments helps in prioritising. Once you know the different segments, which matter for the business, you can target the specific segments for the marketing campaigns.
Clothing brand Abercrombie and Fitch was infamous about their razor sharp targeting. In 2013 its CEO Mike Jeffries said, “We go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive, all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong in our clothes, and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.”
If you ain’t got the customer segments, fire.
2. What do you stand for
Remember Steve Job’s talk about ‘Think Different’ campaign. It was not just a great advertising campaign. It was about how do customers should perceive Apple and its products regarding their competitors. If there is no effort from the business, then customers identify your brand in context of the competing brands, such as cheaper this or more expensive that.
Professor Ritson wrote, “A brand needs the consumer to know that it exists and to think two or three things about it. Those two or three things are what we require the brand position to be. Write them down.”
You can call them brand purpose, positioning statement or North Star. It matters. If the marketer isn’t helping your brand with positioning, please look for a different one.
3. How to achieve the goal
Every business wants to earn more, or sell more, or capture the market share. The marketer or the agency should always share a list of objectives, which will achieve the broad goals of more sales. Jazzy objectives such as more engagement, and viral content do not make the cut.
Impactful objectives require purchase funnels. A purchase channel should tell you the percentage of target customers desiring your brand, intending to buy, considering to buy the products, and finally buying it ( conversion).
There shouldn’t be more than three or four objectives. Always check if the objectives are SMART: specific, measurable, ambitious, realistic, time bound. For example, Tourism Australia’s aimed to increase the visitors from US by increasing the intention by double digits.
You know what to do if the objectives sound like Gary V’s. Fire.
With the three questions, you can ask the marketers to focus on the right things, instead of trends or shiny things.
Interesting things
The rise and fall, and rise of Abercrombie & Fitch Link
Don’t love your business hero Link
60:40 rule of marketing Link
Fire your marketer now was originally published in The Bootstrappers on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.