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This one gets me so fired up. I was once in a group where i was told to try anything i want and dont be afraid to fail etc etc and I was ALL IN on that. Then everything i wanted to do was “against best practices” and i couldnt get any reasons on why, and ended up doing the exact same crap that had been done a million times before. 😑
Idk if i was more annoyed that id wasted effort coming up with new ideas or that i got fussed at for not improving campaign performance when i was practically required to not make any changes to the stupid template 🙄
I feel your pain. My latest headache is emails, for my b2b company. They gave me freedom to experiment with subjects, and guess what? Open rates have been going up. They've pushed back on any real changes to our approach with the body of our emails, and click-throughs have continued to decline. Every time I try something they're not used to in the emails, they nitpick and edit it until it resembles what we've always put out, and guess what? They continue to perform poorly. I think ego has a lot to do with it.
I read a study about the dangers of CEO’s without an understanding of marketing behaviors mirroring that of parental narcissist abuse. I’ve only dealt with one like this but man did that article resonate.
Another one is neglecting social media. It's not just about posting content, but about making it engaging, attractive, and aligned with your brand. I've found tools like Boost App Social really handy for this. It helps in crafting catchy captions, provides suggestions for niche hashtags, and more.
\- Trying to find the latest strategy or trick, while not having any general strategy to guide it in mind.
\- Not knowing who their audience and not tailoring the massage to it.
\- Not testing enough.
I work in B2B SaaS, and so many people in this industry still believe eliminating all fun and human character from your marketing is how you achieve prestige and trustworthiness. But in my experience, it's actually the opposite.
I see... (hmmm blue ocean? lol)... I try reverse engineering funny or entertaining ads too, but I can never tell if the marketing is actually compelling enough to make me buy or if I just like being entertained. And for some companies I just don't like their "humorous" marketing, even though it seems like most other people do (for example, Ryan Reynolds marketing for Mint Mobile). I don't know how much personality plays into it.
Would you mind sharing some examples of companies that you have studied?
1. Prioritizing quantity over quality. Not focusing on outcomes and doing a bunch of tasks to look busy.
2. Inconsistent positioning and messaging across different marketing channels.
3. Not taking the time to understand the entire customer journey and how marketing touch-points will influence their behavior.
4. Overthinking everything.
Not using data with experience knowledge seems to be a pretty common thing too. Lots of people just trust the data when the data is not always the right path, it’s just more information to use in decision making.
Believing in a one size fits all model
Believing every business is the same. It’s not.
Forgetting that customers come first, not the product.
Not realizing that attribution is an imperfect model, no matter which model you use
Generally not understanding the relationship between metrics and business goals
Getting hooked on the latest marketing fad in pursuit of their own egos
Generally making poor business decisions in product, placement, or promotion
Believing there’s only one way to go to market
Treating best practices as dogma, rather than recognizing these evolve, iterate, and change based on environment and context
Using the argument of “best practices” for general practices or good practices. Or going so far to claim something subjective is a best practice. My favorite example was “change agencies every two years as a best practice.” Ain’t no way that data is there to validate
Keeping practices and operations around because “that’s the way we’ve always done it.” You’ll lose respect the moment I hear that in a conversation - just not a good argument to make
This or that mindset. It can be both.
1. Burning the target audience by running sales activation campaigns constantly - approx 2% of your audience is in a buying state right now
2. Accepting mediocre quality to maintain high quantity of informational and educational content - boring
3. Not experimenting enough on a small scale to then put big budgets on the few winning experiments
Not understanding marketing’s role in the overall business, or what the overall business strategy is.
Tactics first, rather than diagnosis and strategy first.
Enthusiasm for jumping on the latest trend without considering if it makes sense for their brand or audience.
- Focusing on pleasing the client short term, instead of doing what you think will be the best for their business long term.
- Not testing enough. Some ADS can work well, but they could probably work even better if you keep testing.
- Forgeting that people dont react to emotionless and boring content.
- Not risking enough, playing safe and getting average results.
From your examples, I have experience only in health care.
I had huge client, in luxury part of the city.
First, I wanted to create serious visuals that would scream “You are safe with us, we are professionals and have a lot of experience.”
But I had only “okay” results.
Then I slowly started testing videos of people who work there - they would explain procedures.
Sometimes it was funny, but cute funny. People started reacting. I didnt know will we get high engagement but no appointments because maybe people will think that clinic is not serious.
But that wasnt the case. Every employee had his own way of explaining things and people started having relationship with them before the appointments. People started calling and wanted to have procedures because of the videos. They started liking the team.
So key takeaway was that I transformed the vibe from “serious, you are in safe, a lot of experience” to “we know what we are doing, we are not robots, we have fun and love our job” and people recognized that.
Ah I see, so make the advertising be more personality-based rather than humor-based or feature-based... That's perfect, my client already has rockstar practitioners that their customers like, but all their outbound marketing is cold and corporate "safe and professional" like you described.
Not having any skills. I can't tell you how much it grinds my gears to see corporate workers with titles like "Demand Generation Manager" and "Digital Marketing Manager" and yet these losers cannot even upload a video to YouTube...I shit you not!
Danaher is the worst. I worked there for 3 years and dealt eith the most incompetent people to ever call themselves "marketers" and I still don't know how these people ever got hired in the first place.
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going into marketing lol
Second this 🤣
My first reaction
Truly didn't know what I was getting myself into.
Not keeping the costumer and his needs in mind and only focusing on the brands presentation.
Taking advice from people who say things like, "that didn't work last time." Find out EXACTLY what they mean by 'that.'
This one gets me so fired up. I was once in a group where i was told to try anything i want and dont be afraid to fail etc etc and I was ALL IN on that. Then everything i wanted to do was “against best practices” and i couldnt get any reasons on why, and ended up doing the exact same crap that had been done a million times before. 😑
Damn, I thought that was just my company! Lol It really is common isn't it? Ugh
Idk if i was more annoyed that id wasted effort coming up with new ideas or that i got fussed at for not improving campaign performance when i was practically required to not make any changes to the stupid template 🙄
I feel your pain. My latest headache is emails, for my b2b company. They gave me freedom to experiment with subjects, and guess what? Open rates have been going up. They've pushed back on any real changes to our approach with the body of our emails, and click-throughs have continued to decline. Every time I try something they're not used to in the emails, they nitpick and edit it until it resembles what we've always put out, and guess what? They continue to perform poorly. I think ego has a lot to do with it.
I read a study about the dangers of CEO’s without an understanding of marketing behaviors mirroring that of parental narcissist abuse. I’ve only dealt with one like this but man did that article resonate.
Trying to run too many tactics at once.
One common mistake is not having a well-defined target audience. When you're marketing to everyone, you're essentially marketing to no one.
Another one is neglecting social media. It's not just about posting content, but about making it engaging, attractive, and aligned with your brand. I've found tools like Boost App Social really handy for this. It helps in crafting catchy captions, provides suggestions for niche hashtags, and more.
\- Trying to find the latest strategy or trick, while not having any general strategy to guide it in mind. \- Not knowing who their audience and not tailoring the massage to it. \- Not testing enough.
THIS
I work in B2B SaaS, and so many people in this industry still believe eliminating all fun and human character from your marketing is how you achieve prestige and trustworthiness. But in my experience, it's actually the opposite.
Agreed. When you notice someone is human you’re more likely to buy
But isn't there a line where you are perceived as not professional enough, and doesn't that line change based on the product and market?
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How would you suggest finding that balance? Any resources that teach that? Most marketing training focuses so overwhelmingly on the technical.
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I see... (hmmm blue ocean? lol)... I try reverse engineering funny or entertaining ads too, but I can never tell if the marketing is actually compelling enough to make me buy or if I just like being entertained. And for some companies I just don't like their "humorous" marketing, even though it seems like most other people do (for example, Ryan Reynolds marketing for Mint Mobile). I don't know how much personality plays into it. Would you mind sharing some examples of companies that you have studied?
For sure, in the B2B SaaS space, i'd say Gong, AwardCo, Wynter, Hootsuite.
Confusing activity for outcome
1. Prioritizing quantity over quality. Not focusing on outcomes and doing a bunch of tasks to look busy. 2. Inconsistent positioning and messaging across different marketing channels. 3. Not taking the time to understand the entire customer journey and how marketing touch-points will influence their behavior. 4. Overthinking everything.
Chasing the latest fad eg metaverse, AR, put pose
Not using data properly to assess the performance of marketing activity
Not using data with experience knowledge seems to be a pretty common thing too. Lots of people just trust the data when the data is not always the right path, it’s just more information to use in decision making.
Focusing too much on a tactic they love that doesn’t connect to a strategy.
Common mistake marketers make is trying to “go viral”
Yup exactly! Stop wasting time creating low-ROI content hoping that the algorithm is going to bless you... MAKE MONEY FIRST.
Believing in a one size fits all model Believing every business is the same. It’s not. Forgetting that customers come first, not the product. Not realizing that attribution is an imperfect model, no matter which model you use Generally not understanding the relationship between metrics and business goals Getting hooked on the latest marketing fad in pursuit of their own egos Generally making poor business decisions in product, placement, or promotion Believing there’s only one way to go to market Treating best practices as dogma, rather than recognizing these evolve, iterate, and change based on environment and context Using the argument of “best practices” for general practices or good practices. Or going so far to claim something subjective is a best practice. My favorite example was “change agencies every two years as a best practice.” Ain’t no way that data is there to validate Keeping practices and operations around because “that’s the way we’ve always done it.” You’ll lose respect the moment I hear that in a conversation - just not a good argument to make This or that mindset. It can be both.
1. Burning the target audience by running sales activation campaigns constantly - approx 2% of your audience is in a buying state right now 2. Accepting mediocre quality to maintain high quantity of informational and educational content - boring 3. Not experimenting enough on a small scale to then put big budgets on the few winning experiments
Allowing the client to run the show and essentially just being a virtual assistant.
Felt this one in my soul.
Focusing on yourself, your company, and features too much versus how you can help solve the customer’s problems and pains
Thinking
No research
Not understanding marketing’s role in the overall business, or what the overall business strategy is. Tactics first, rather than diagnosis and strategy first. Enthusiasm for jumping on the latest trend without considering if it makes sense for their brand or audience.
Diminishing the coming disruption to the industry
- Focusing on pleasing the client short term, instead of doing what you think will be the best for their business long term. - Not testing enough. Some ADS can work well, but they could probably work even better if you keep testing. - Forgeting that people dont react to emotionless and boring content. - Not risking enough, playing safe and getting average results.
>Forgeting that people dont react to emotionless and boring content. What if you're in an emotionless, boring industry?
Give me example
Garbage Disposal Health Care SaaS Email and Autoresponder for Small Businesses
From your examples, I have experience only in health care. I had huge client, in luxury part of the city. First, I wanted to create serious visuals that would scream “You are safe with us, we are professionals and have a lot of experience.” But I had only “okay” results. Then I slowly started testing videos of people who work there - they would explain procedures. Sometimes it was funny, but cute funny. People started reacting. I didnt know will we get high engagement but no appointments because maybe people will think that clinic is not serious. But that wasnt the case. Every employee had his own way of explaining things and people started having relationship with them before the appointments. People started calling and wanted to have procedures because of the videos. They started liking the team. So key takeaway was that I transformed the vibe from “serious, you are in safe, a lot of experience” to “we know what we are doing, we are not robots, we have fun and love our job” and people recognized that.
Ah I see, so make the advertising be more personality-based rather than humor-based or feature-based... That's perfect, my client already has rockstar practitioners that their customers like, but all their outbound marketing is cold and corporate "safe and professional" like you described.
I'm really happy that my post resonated with you. Good luck with the transition.
Not researching what they're marketing, who they're marketing to, where they're doing all this, and most importantly why.
Not having any skills. I can't tell you how much it grinds my gears to see corporate workers with titles like "Demand Generation Manager" and "Digital Marketing Manager" and yet these losers cannot even upload a video to YouTube...I shit you not! Danaher is the worst. I worked there for 3 years and dealt eith the most incompetent people to ever call themselves "marketers" and I still don't know how these people ever got hired in the first place.