Marketing without the hype - why we need a back to basics approach - MAF298

Is our marketing activity annoying our customers? Is the hype surrounding the latest digital toys making us obsessed with digital tactics at the expense of customer focus? Maybe it's time to rediscover the full marketing picture, including customer research, product development, pricing, and promotion. Maybe it's time how to rediscover how to develop a deep, almost obsessive understanding of customers and their needs, and articulate a clear, standout offer that's simple and easy to understand.

Welcome to episode 298 of the Marketing and Finance Podcast and another short, sharp episode in the Simply Marketing series. Hello and welcome to the Marketing and Finance Podcast. Thank you, as always, for downloading or streaming the show. I really do appreciate you taking the time to listening to my rants.

And this week is another short, sharp episode about keeping marketing simple. But I've been really troubled recently by the massive amount of hype that seems to be surrounding digital marketing tools at the moment, or should we call them digital marketing toys? Now, when we were in the grip of the metaverse hype last year, the thing that struck me most was how many companies were coming up with solutions to problems that didn't actually exist. I mean, look at what Meta was saying about virtual meetings.

How many people really wanted to go into a virtual meeting having to wear a helmet that turns them into a Cyberman so they can see crappy anime avatars of their colleagues sitting in a woeful facsimile of a meeting room? I mean, who was asking for that? No, it seemed to me more about developers trying to outdo other developers and forgetting the basic rules of marketing positioning, coming up with a product or service that meets a genuine customer need. Now the hype surrounding the metaverse has been replaced by an equally insane hype around AI.

Once again, I see companies diving in with the only aim to outdo each other and once again forgetting the basics of marketing I mean who doing proper customer research around customer needs here Where the positioning Where the offer Do these companies even have a strategy No it seems we being swept along on another tsunami of hype where winning the AI race is the only aim, even though no one has worked out where the finishing line is. It just made me realise you forget the basic principles of marketing at your peril.

And that's what this episode of the Marketing and Finance podcast is going to be about. And I'm just wondering whether we really need to set aside our obsession with marketing toys for a moment and just think about the basics of marketing once again. Has the digital marketing revolution made us forget about those basics? Now, I don't want to sound negative here.

On the plus side, digital marketing has been a massive boon for companies all over the world. All of those apps that now allow us to write copy faster, design marketing collateral faster, look at data, send out emails. It's been fantastic. Digital technology has made marketing communications more accessible to more businesses for less investment than at any time in history.

Let's face it, it's revolutionized how companies and brands deliver communications messages to customers. It's made it easier and more cost effective than ever to target an advert at a specific group of customers. Techniques once only available to big corporates with eye-watering budgets are now within reach of those with a few pounds to spend, as well as those with many millions. We can't underestimate how incredible an opportunity this has been, but there's been a few negative consequences.

Marketing experts speaking at conferences, authors and social media influencers have concentrated on digital marketing tactics like SEO, email lists and social media adverts, and this has damaged, in my opinion, in the wider marketing discipline at a time it has opened communications to all budgets. It's made marketing less customer-focused and potentially more annoying. It may even have made marketing scarier for people and companies who are not experts in marketing in the first place.

Many of the companies I work with don't have marketing departments. They may not have people who are marketing trained. They may have people who, in inverted commas, do marketing as part of their job For these people it can be hard to get their head around all this talk about SEO pay email lists funnels and league madness So I want to look at the consequences of the digital marketing revolution and let face it the massive hype surrounding a lot of these digital tools nowadays in a little bit more detail Firstly, to many people today, marketing just means communications, advertising, social media, promotion.

Marketing is the same as advertising for a lot of people. we've forgotten about the wider discipline. We started talking less about custom research, products and price, and more about SEO clicks and likes. Secondly, it's become a scary mishmash of technology jargon and hype.

I recently had a conversation with a client who was getting quite anxious because she didn't have a digital marketing funnel and seemed quite relieved when I told her that in her business, it actually wasn't necessary. And thirdly, in some respects, marketing has become even more intrusive, annoying, enraging. Endless emails, pop-up adverts that prevent you from reading an article or watching a video. Are enraging communications happening because the people who send them aren't thinking about customer needs anymore?

Only successful calls to action. And is it because digital communications are so easy for anybody to put together now that we just don't think? We put it together and we hit send. How do we fix these problems and continue to benefit from the advantages of digital technology without getting swept away by all the hype surrounding the digital tactics and toys?

We must start talking about the whole marketing mix again, rather than just the digital tactics of communications. That means developing a deep, almost obsessive understanding of the customer again, and then put together an articulate, clear and standout offer. and marry these up with a set of exciting goals. And we need to do all of these things before looking at the digital tactics of communication.

Secondly, I think we need to put everything through something I call a simplicity filter. Can you explain your product and service in simple language? Can you explain it without jargon or gobbledygook? Can you ignore all the technical talk?

And finally perhaps we need to concentrate on engaging rather than enraging our customers Of course we need to use the digital tools of communication at our fingertips but how can we help our customers with our promotions and content Maybe we need to focus more on answering their questions with our content, giving them all the information they need about our products and services versus our competitors, giving them all the information they need about the price in an engaging way rather than an annoying way.

I use this mantra and it's been bubbling away in my mind for a while. If, as a customer myself, I don't like all that intrusive, annoying advertising, why would I think it's okay to do that to my customers? Have a think about that. By starting to talk about the whole discipline again, whether it's at conferences or in articles and videos by starting to think about the customer and the products and the price as well as the SEO clicks and likes.

We can put the customer back into the spotlight. Yes, we can still play with all the digital toys, but if we have the customer focus again, maybe we can come above the hype and start being engaging rather than enraging. And what do we get from a better customer focus? We get engaged rather than enraged customers, and that means they're more likely to buy from us.

And that's got to mean more success in the future for our businesses. Well, thanks for listening to that rant about going back to basics on marketing. I'd love to know what you think about this subject. Have you been inadvertently swept up in all the hype surrounding the metaverse, surrounding NFT, surrounding AI?

Are you thinking it's time to go back to basics and start where it's most important? Focusing on the customer. Hit me up on Twitter, Roger underscore Edwards, or visit my website, rogeredwards.co.

uk. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Marketing and Finance Podcast, another one of my short, sharp, Simply Marketing series episodes. Until the next episode, keep marketing your business to keep growing your business.