5 Semi-Controversial Things I Believe about Marketing

B2B influencer and “My First Million” co-host Shaan Puri’s pinned tweet is a thread stating “a few semi-controversial things” he believes. 

Here are five semi-controversial things I believe about marketing.

You Can Just Do Stuff

One of the biggest roadblocks to marketing/business success is the belief that you need to undertake a drawn-out process to do anything significant.

Some companies take years to update their website. By contrast, one of my client CMOs asked me to rewrite their homepage and a key product page last week. I did it in under 24 hours. Is that necessarily how that page will remain forever? No, but I’d like to think the copy is much better than what preceded it. And you can always iterate.

In short, you can just do stuff — even big, important stuff. There’s no excuse for paralysis.

Measuring Leads Is Stupid

B2B marketing measurement is generally overrated. It distracts from the work marketing should really be focused on — building the company’s reputation and relationships — and incentivizes the adoption of bullshit tools and tactics to meet arbitrary metrics divorced from business reality.

This is especially true of leads. Sometimes people will ask me in the sales process about how I measure the leads driven by content and PR.

For the most part, I don’t. What we do is build your reputation, mostly with thought leadership content that helps you get in front of your customers and those who influence them daily. If you want, there are two ways to measure that — leading indicators such as engagement on social from relevant accounts and, ultimately, pipeline growth.

But my honest take on this is that the companies and individuals who really get B2B marketing know if it’s working or not. They know if they’re succeeding at building their reputation and relationships — because more partners, influencers, and customers are engaging with their content and reaching out to them. Officially, this is awareness and pipeline growth. Unofficially, it’s the “I’ve been seeing you everywhere” effect.

In short, you know marketing success when you see it. If you don’t know how to spot it, dubious software such as Meltwater probably won’t convince you.

You Don’t Have Enough News to Rely on Traditional PR

People sometimes laud the PR activities of the biggest companies in adtech. To be sure, those companies have great PR pros working for them. But also, much of what those companies do is news by dint of how big they are. They don’t need a brilliant pitch. They just get covered because they’re one of the five biggest companies in the industry, making anything they do significant.

The opposite is true for the vast majority of adtech and martech companies. They simply don’t have enough hard news to warrant traditional press coverage more than, say, once or twice a month.

So, for adtech startups and smaller companies, it’s not worth concentrating on or having a resource exclusively for traditional PR. Instead, you should take an insights-driven approach to marketing. 

No one wants to cover or hear about your latest partnership or product update. But if you can tell your customers every day how to better understand the industry and do their jobs, they will listen to you. Similarly, if you have genuinely provocative and consensus-challenging takes on the industry, journalists will care about you and reach out to you (even though they don’t care about a new product feature). 

That’s how the average adtech company should be approaching marketing, not pitching reporters on inconsequential, self-centered announcements. 

Marketing Strategy Is Simple

People like to make strategy complicated because it insulates them from disruption. “I am the oracle who cannot be replaced.” Marketing strategy boils down to three questions:

1. What’s the business problem marketing can help with?

2. What’s the message?

3. Where and how will we distribute the message to reach our customers and those who influence them?

A message should do three things:

1. Clarify what the company does and for whom

2. Differentiate the company from its competitors

3. Galvanize customers and influencers

If you remember these frameworks, you can probably drastically improve your homepage copy / message, approach to earnings calls / investor updates, and distribution strategy. You can also make sure your marketing strategy is aligned with the problems that really matter to the business.

Marketing strategy is not rocket science. It’s rarely done well not because it’s super complex but because:

1. It requires a certain level of clarity most marketers can’t provide

2. Effective strategic marketers need to have a genuine philosophy or point of view on how to achieve success; they can’t just be ‘doing the work’

3. Execution requires focus and consistency across a long period of time

The last point brings me to my final semi-controversial belief.

Most Companies Suck at Marketing for 2 Reasons: Wrong Focus and Inconsistency

Again, people like to make things complicated because they think complicated equals smart, professional, and serious. So, if you ask the average marketing leader or consultant to diagnose the weaknesses in your marketing program, they’ll probably tell you about the need for an audit and maybe even fancy software. I’m not saying those things don’t have their place, but their utility for most small to medium-size B2B companies is marginal. 

Rather, for the vast majority of B2B companies, marketing execution problems boil down to two factors:

1. You’re focused on the wrong things. Exhibit A: Most adtech companies with 10+ marketers do not have a single person dedicated to social media. How is this possible? LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, and industry Slacks offer a chance to influence the conversation in real-time every day, building your reputation, shifting industry narratives, and forging direct relationships with customers and influencers. How could one of your first 10 marketing hires not be someone whose job is to do this?

2. You’re inconsistent. Eric Franchi and I recently recorded a podcast with leading mobile expert Eric Seufert. Eric Seufert is a prime example of someone who’s built his career and several businesses on the basis of thought leadership: sharing his analysis of the mobile sector with a public audience. He’s published a blog just about every week since he started his publication Mobile Dev Memo over a decade ago, and he’s also active on Twitter, LinkedIn, Slack, and now audio via his own podcast. But the main thing I learned from our conversation with Eric was that, like most writers (myself included), he lingered in obscurity for years before breaking through. We’re talking about “10 views” on a blog post being a success (in his own words). This is why most companies fail at modern B2B marketing. It’s not that they don’t know how to do it in theory. It’s that they want to be industry celebrities or thought leaders overnight and aren’t willing to put in the reps to do it. (And, by the way, you probably don’t need to wait years. But influence won’t materialize overnight.)

If you’ve read this far, I hope you leave this little essay fired up to go make a big impact on your company’s success with marketing. Because, to synthesize, marketing is not necessarily easy (if it were, everyone would succeed at it), but it is straightforward. 

Devise a differentiated and galvanizing message. Distribute it where you’ll have the maximum impact on your customers and those who influence them. Make sure you’re gaining some traction without worrying too much about dubious metrics. And be consistent.

Do that, and you’ll be in the top 10% of adtech marketing organizations. 

Growth awaits!