Performance Marketing Contradictions
1. Prioritizing agile revenue vs. strategic brand efforts
It's a difficult time for marketers; showing up and demonstrating your dept is a revenue machine matters. We get it. However, giving more importance to fast revenue solutions has a limit. At some point, all companies in all categories will face an inevitable truth: 80% or more of your potential customers are not ready to buy today.
Strategic efforts that help your brand develop resonance and add value to these future buyers matter just as much. It may differ from what your department needs to show in the present, but would there even be a future without it?
2. Reusing playbooks over doing research
We evolved to find the most effortless ways to accomplish everything we need to do in life. We change and adapt fast, but just as in biology, once we find a way forward, we stop being curious and go all in to evolve.
It works.
When it comes to marketing, the process is similar. We prefer doing what we think will help us move the needle. Instead of starting from scratch, we prefer deploying “proven tactics”, except they don't always work.
Research is hard. It requires understanding internal information and reviewing countless interactions between users, sales, marketing CX, etc. It's also the only way to unlock growth opportunities you will miss if you copy-paste whatever you think worked in another context.
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to anything.
3. Overestimating "doing more" over "doing better"
It's a time of anxiety. I have only checked Slack 14 times, read and replied to 4 emails, and scrolled at least 10 minutes on LinkedIn before returning to finish this paragraph.
Focusing is hard. And in marketing with endless channels, tactics, and formats, escaping this anxiety is almost impossible. Instead of moving slowly and truly identifying what works with limited activities, we want to do it all. It's easy to feel like you "should launch another campaign," implement a calculator, or doubling down on video.
One of the most underrated yet powerful marketing principles is the importance of being persistent. Instead of trying to do more all the time, try doing better in a limited and premeditated set of channels. The more you focus on being strategic, learning to say no to 90% of distractions, and just doing the work, the better results you may have. Plus, even algorithms need time to learn.
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