Guilty Marketers

Guilty Marketers – Wasted & Wishful Multi-Channel Marketing Spend
Opening Keynote for Search Engine Strategies Conference, Chicago, November 15-17, 2011
By Mikel Chertrudi, SES Advisory Board & Senior Director of Marketing for Adobe

This will be updated and edited at a later date, but I wanted to get my notes online ASAP.

By 2020, there will be 50,000,000 connected devices.

As marketing professionals, what should we be doing better in our profession? We need to change the conversation in marketing.

Changing the Marketing Conversation

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” – John Wanamaker (Father of Modern Advertising)

Up to 40% of digital marketing is still wasted. We aren’t investing our marketing dollars in optimal channels, so money is still wasted. We’re leaving money on the table. If you can regain that money, you will succeed in marketing.

Many of us still refer to marketing budget as spend. We should be calling it investment. It’s a perception issue. We talk about burning money. What’s your burn rate? We need to refer to our budget as fuel or as a catalyst. If we change the perception we can be viewed as an investment instead of a cost center.

What is a guilty marketer? Knowing better,nut doing it anyway.

What is a wishful marketer? Hoping our efforts are positively impacting the business, but lacking the evidence.

What is a clueless marketer? We should know better, but no one has stated the obvious. Don’t stare down the barrel of a gun to see if it’s loaded.

Alleged Accounts of being convicted “guilty”

Top 7 alleged accounts of guilty marketers.

1. lack of clear strategy and objectives – don’t focus on the individual tactics, but on the strategy and objectives
2. sloppy in our efforts to track and measure – if you use multiple systems such as email servers, web analytics, and ad servers, you are probably double counting, unless you use the same tracking method across all systems
3. assume to much –
4. too much art / right brain – you should be testing and optimizing like crazy
5. too much science / left brain – best conversion tactics (40 pt red, blinking text has highest conversion rate
6. short term vs long term oriented – brand is more than logos and colors. Our brand is how we treat our customers.
7. unauthentic – don’t copy others just because it works. Does it represent your brand? What makes you different from your competitors?

If someone hit delete on you and your job, would anyone notice? You have to be able to show results. If you don’t have a clear objective, it really doesn’t matter. You should know what part of sales you directly source, versus what you influence.

Negligent Acts of “Wishfulness” aka “Cluelessness”

Top 3 Reasons for our Cluelessness

1. Misunderstanding our Businesses – we can dump as much money into the to of the funnel as possible, but if you can’t convert the traffic at the bottom of the funnel, it doesn’t make sense. Maybe you can save more marketing dollars at the top and work on the constraints at the bottom.
2. Organizational and Tactic Silos – if you have a lot of people in marketing, they have to be on the same page. What impact does email marketing have on search or display advertising, etc.
3. Improperly Attributing Attribution Models – how do you give correct credit to which marketing method created the lead or sale? Last click, first click, all-even or weighted? If you’re not using weighted, you are probably over counting and leaving money on the table.

Investing Correctly – Top Marketing Criteria

8 Questions that Every CMO Should Ask

1. Which words do we use? sales, leads, ROI? what percentage of sales can be attributed to digital marketing?
2. validate what we assume to know – finance and accounting should be your best friends. They should be able to validate your assumptions. Sales won’t argue with finance.
3. do we have a clear way to measure and track results? – everything should be tied to sales
4. attribute to the real results – what are the financial outcomes, not just leads and orders and outcomes
5. attribute attribution correctly – create a valid attribution model. That is what lets you know exactly what your channel is responsible for as related to sales.
6. do we understand ur measurements
7. does marketing behave like a team?
8. balance the right brain and left brain

Guiltymarketer.blogspot.com – report guilty marketing anonymously

Channel surfing – measuring across channels