Just slap a banging hot poster girl on the front of your product and that’ll sell, right?
Lots of coloured textas, Post-it notes and butcher’s paper, that’s what marketing is, yeah?
Marketers are just like these characters below, sitting around, one brilliant idea, then it’s home time.
Marketing isn’t always as it seems. B&T is playing myth busters and debunking some common misconceptions throughout the profession.
Myth #1: Sex isn’t relevant anymore
Busted: “Sex might not sell, but it certainly grabs our attention,” argues experiential marketing agency PLAY Communications’ head of strategy, Tom Sanders.
“It’s absolutely still relevant, if only because a) it’s the driving force keeping this species alive and b) every year brings another new generation of consumers who think they’re the first to discover it.
“To argue sex is no longer relevant is to deliberately ignore a fundamental human behaviour. It’s like asking whether sniffing bums is still relevant to dogs.”
Myth #2: Creativity is the most important factor
Busted: It’s not all sketching and creative juices flowing out of ears. Marketing manager at PLAY, Matt Gillings, says: “Often the industry makes so much emphasis on how ‘creative’ a piece of work is.
“Sure work should grab consumers’ attention with creative execution but if the product, the message or the media choice is terrible – the work has no hope.”
Myth #3: The best agencies are the ones that have all the awards
Busted: “You shouldn’t have to sell yourself if you’re good at what you do,” says Gaye Steel, marketing director of retail communications agency GuihenJones. A firm believer in the power of word of mouth, Steel believes advocacy means more than being showered in awards. “When it comes to gaining new clients, advocacy is the best,” she says.
Myth #4: Brands should plague all social media channels
Busted: Social media agency Kamber stresses content should be the top priority when a company is posting to a social media channel. Its strategist Jason Olive says: “Content should always come first and the selection of channels should come second. Once you have developed a solid content strategy that is linked to broader business objectives, then you can select the most relevant locations where that content can be published, especially in relation to where your target audience is participating.”
Myth #5: Marketers must lead the way
Busted: Sometimes the smartest marketer is the follower, says GuihenJones’ Steel.
“Leaders create category innovation and are supposed to constantly lead innovation,” she says. “Sometimes a follower strategy is the smarter strategy because you don’t have to do all the leg work.”
Myth #6: All content sharing happens over Twitter and Facebook.
Busted: More than half of all content sharing is shared via the recesses of ‘dark social’, copying and pasting links into emails or IMs and sending to others, says advertising platform RadiumOne’s CEO, Kerry McCabe.
“Many companies have entire teams dedicated to understanding, creating and distributing ‘social’ content,” he says, however not enough brands are utilising this ‘dark social’ he believes.
Myth #7: You can’t measure ROI on social media
Busted: It’s all about having the right metrics, Kamber’s Olive says. Businesses need to have its objectives in place and then the measurement model will come after that. “For example,” Olive says, “measuring ROI for an e-commerce business may involve setting up the checkout page of your e-commerce site as a goal and tracking conversions using the appropriate analytics solution. From this point, you would divide the overall cost of the brand’s social media activity by the number of conversions. This would be tracked over time to see if the cost per conversion is getting more economical.”
Similarly, US-based technology company Gigya says one of the biggest social media marketing myths is people believing social media ROI doesn’t exist, with only 12% of marketers claiming to have a clear understanding of social media ROI.
Myth #8: Facebook ‘likes’ are the best way to see if your brand is killing it on social
Busted: While we’re busting a bunch of other social media myths, Jill Draper from blog site iMediaConnections says ‘likes’ on Facebook are becoming meaningless. She says: “These days, new techniques make social media marketing more measurable, and new technologies are giving digital marketers a fresh lens to view the landscape. Because of these developments, which allow marketers to assign tiers to value, ‘likes’ are less meaningful, and deeper social media engagement such as product reviews and sharing can take centre stage.”
Myth #9: Consumers purchase right through the campaign’s life
Busted: 80% of conversions to buy a product happen within the first hour of being exposed to the creative, according to RadiumOne.
Chief marketing officer Eric Bader, says to illustrate the point RadiumOne analysed two recent travel and financial services campaigns.
“In the first, the travel client, 81% of the conversions happened in the first hour. After that first hour, the conversion rate dropped by seven times,” says Bader. “This means that for the marketer, the time between the signal and the impression is absolutely crucial for monetising the ‘sweet spot’ of any direct response campaign.”
Myth #10: All brands need a mobile app
Busted: It’s not always necessary for a brand to have a mobile app. When iMediaConnections Draper was busting her own digital marketing myths, she said: “A mobile app is only a good engagement tool if it delivers value to the customer. Too many companies take the ‘me too’ route and develop mobile apps that don’t have a real purpose, which customers tend to find more irritating than helpful.”
