Six Marketing Resolutions for 2006

It is that time of the year when we make those commitments to ourselves: lose weight, exercise more, spend more time with the kids, etc. Here is my suggested list of New Year’s Resolutions if you want to make a substantial impact on your company’s marketing efforts.

1. Measure everything you do. Your credibility is on the line. Management used to cut marketing and advertising a lot of slack. They used to buy the line that some things in marketing are difficult to measure, or that even if you could measure results, you would need long-term tracking studies to see how brand awareness scores had increased.

Management isn’t buying it any more and they shouldn’t. People in the marketing loop need to demonstrate what all those precious company resources are producing for the bottom line. You’re profit or you’re overhead; take your pick.

Marketing measurement is a relatively new science in the Internet age and one that requires a great deal of expertise, experience and deep resources to implement. An Excel spreadsheet may help, but it’s not the answer...especially if you have a complex sales cycle.

2. Replace reach with relevancy. In the mass media era (now long past its prime), advertising itself was expensive. You had to buy reach. You had to buy frequency. Guess what? People, by now, have had way too much practice avoiding or tuning out messages that aren’t relevant to them. At best, they’ll ignore your ads. At worst, you’ll annoy them.

Complicating all of this is media multi-tasking. Observe a teenager at home and you’ll see what I mean. They are watching TV. They are online with their wireless laptop shopping on a web site in one window, reading their email message in another window and also getting instant messages. They are on their phone talking and text messaging. They may have music playing on iTunes. They may be doing their homework. And they are doing these things all at the same time! This is the future. How do you break through this wall of distraction? You do it by learning about the market (often with data gathered in resolution #1) and getting through to them with a relevant message that they are interested in seeing, hearing or reading about. You don’t do it by expensively droning a non-relevant message to them over and over.

The great thing about all this is if you learn to be relevant, advertising is no longer expensive and the cost/benefit is dramatically better.

3. Get outside the box. Get outside the TV box, get outside the radio box, and get outside the newspaper box. All of these types of media are great and they will continue to be around for a long time, but there is also a rapidly growing world of marketing fueled mostly by the Web.

There are now one billion people connected through the Internet. Would you rather get someone’s attention for 30-seconds in an ad or have them spend twenty minutes on your Web site? Traditional media can drive people to your business, to your dealers or to the Web, but generally you can also drive people to your Web site more economically when they are already online...search engine results, pay-per-click, online ads, online PR and more. If you sell high-involvement products–products that involve more time, effort and research before someone makes a purchase–the Web will be an indispensable part of the sales process.

Marketers stay with what they know, but if the “known” world is having diminishing returns it is time to look elsewhere. You can wait to jump into this brave new world, but if you wait much longer you’ll be observing the backs of your competitors as they pass you by. As Albert Einstein said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” If you want to better results, you have to try something new.

4. Focus on the brand experience. With all the marketing hype out there, people are going to focus a great deal more on the experience they have with your brand rather than what you tell them. Marketing is a wonderful tool to get people’s attention. If you do get their attention, your brand better be able to deliver with great products/services, great customer support and great people at the customer interface. There’s an old saying, “The quickest way to kill a bad product is with good advertising.” It is still true. Don’t spend money and staff resources on marketing unless you have the rest of the equation figured out.

Your Web site is becoming one of the most important brand experience touchpoints for your brand. It is often the first place potential customers interface with your organization. Is your Web site brochureware or is it set up to create an outstanding user-experience on the front end and provide you with revenues and valuable data on the back end?

5. Good ideas are as important as ever. There is still way too much of what ad man David Ogilvy called irrelevant brilliance out there. That is advertising that is clever, funny, or witty but somehow misses the point and doesn’t produce the necessary results. Clever, funny, and witty is great, but the whole idea is to sell something. Great marketing is fueled by great ideas. It is almost impossible for breakthrough advertising to happen unless someone has thought out the marketing thoroughly and can chart a cogent strategy.

Too much money is spent on advertising that is solving the incorrect or ill-defined marketing problem. Once the marketing picture is clear, you need people who can implement good ideas throughout the whole marketing spectrum. Creativity is not just associated with advertising. It is necessary for creativity to permeate the marketing function from top to bottom. Purple Cows are still a crying need.

Ask yourself one big question before you spend money on Web development, advertising, PR, trade shows, sales training, sales promotion or event promotion: “Are we addressing the right problem or opportunity with our efforts?” Spending money on brilliantly addressing the wrong question is not marketing. It is a tragic waste of company resources.

6. Focus on the data. OK, so this data thing might seem kind of boring. You didn’t go into marketing because you liked math and regression analysis. You went into marketing because it was fun and exciting. Well it can still be fun and exciting, but it is a new world and all other things being equal, companies that thoroughly gather data and learn from it are the ones that win the marketing wars.

To implement this component of your marketing you need good resources (internal and external) who have had experience at linking, refining and integrating lead generation software, CRM, ERP, databases, content management, campaign management and other data systems. Without data your organization doesn’t have a 360-degree view of the customer. Without data you don’t know what is working and what isn’t. Without data you’re only guessing about where the next big opportunities might be. Without data you are missing valuable information that a better-prepared competitor can use to leapfrog you.

Without data, the other five resolutions above become exceedingly difficult to fulfill. CMOs or other marketing executives who understand this new reality will become heroes. Marketers who don’t will be looking for work.

That’s it. Six resolutions. You have a whole year in front of you to work on them. I wish you a Happy New Year and hope the future holds a world full of promise for all of you.