“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits and sells itself.” That’s according to Peter Drucker, in truth, marketing is about insights more than anything else. Unfortunately, marketing can also be a world unto itself. A smart sounding idea can reverberate through the echo chamber and became conventional wisdom.
Yet many widely held ideas are misleading, if not completely untrue and that can be a problem. When real budgets are spent on false premise, the result is not only missed opportunities; it can damage the underlying business.
Here’s a list of five things that marketers should know:
- There’s No Such Things As Engagement
The term itself is the core of the problem. No one really understand what’s the meaning of “engagement”, and they stipulate that “engagement metrics” is by tweeting, liking, video viewing and so on, and then they measure the success by how a campaign performs against them. This is a much more sensible approach that would be to throw out the term altogether and more focused on value exchange.
- Content Is Crap
The probable hot thing that is going in marketing right now is the content. Marketers are striving to produce, acquire, curate and leverage the content in order to create an “emotional connections”. But the truth is that the content is a crap in which there are times that when using the term is unavoidable, talking about content gets to nowhere, and it much more like about talking “consumers” and “purchase events” in which it doesn’t help to sell more effectively. However, publishing does require an important shift in the marketer’s mindset. While the consumers focused on the published market.
- Influential Are A Myth
The corporate world was so enthralled of the idea on a cottage industry of “influence marketers” that emerged on claiming to be able to identify, target and exploit these magical people. But unfortunately, influential are just a myth in which the idea isn’t exactly new either. It was clear that being influence is highly contextual and not dependent on innate personal characteristics.
- Loyalty Is A Red Herring
It is generally says by the marketers that loyal consumers are more valuable than fickle ones, which means that if you take a look it internal consumer metrics, that’s undeniable true. It is not only the loyalty customer worth more, and it is more expensive to win over a new customer than it is to retain an existing one. Many marketers interfere and it means that loyalty is a viable strategy, which it is not. This strategy will almost always fail. And the only real way to grow your brand is to win more customers.
- Grabbing Attention Isn’t As Important As Holding Attention
The basic idea was that by building awareness, you could increase the target market. But now, building brand awareness can also build awareness of your category and triggers searching activity online. If that happened, the digital trail will instantly established that can be retargeted by others. So, by building awareness and walking away, you are ending up by generally leading your competitors. So, you need to rethink about your marketing strategy for the digital age, by putting less emphasis on grabbing attention and more on holding attention. It means that you need to start treating the customers less like prospect and more likely a partners and the brands is not an asset that need to be leveraged but as a platforms for collaboration.
Most of all, we need to realize that the enhanced capability of digital technology have created a world in which consumers expect true value exchange, rather than buzzwords and lip service. There’s no faking that you either deliver it or you don’t.
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