We’ve been doing a lot of soul searching over the past few months about where we are going as a company and as an industry. Its no surprise to anyone that the pervasiveness of technology has taken root within our organization and the organizations of our clients with such an aggressive nature that I hardly recognize the way things are done.
I was reflecting on my History of Marketing classes in college. The revolutionary thought that investing in mass client persuasion yields multiple time results within the sales channel continues to be an exciting concept. And savvy marketers are always looking for new ways to influence the market. The web, email marketing, social media, app development, big data analytic all bring hot new topics to the table for marketers hoping to gain just a sliver of advantage over the competition.
Yet, what I’ve seen from even the most experience marketing professionals over the past 24 months is alarming. There seems to be an almost complete disconnect between time-tested marketing principles and the “new reality” that our new technology heralds.
In a recent client meeting I asked a new marketing manager to define their TAM. Not only did they not know what THEIR TAM was, but they didn’t know what TAM meant and why it was important for their marketing strategy.
In our design department we constantly remind our clients and ourselves with the old mantra — If everything is bold, NOTHING IS. The challenge comes in the noise modern marketing methods are creating. So lets go back to basics with some ground rules requiring considerable discipline, but that offer real direction as you make important strategic and tactical decisions.
- Leads (contacts) are cheap in the information age — relationships are not
- Know your TAM and the next horizon you are going to target
- Data only tells you where you’ve been – not where you’re going.
- Sales is always the goal – web traffic, impressions, clicks, bounces aren’t real until there is money attached.
- You can’t orchestrate a purchase decision — only influence it
Sounds pretty common sense? It should.