There be two sides to this coin…
- The grand plans of marketers commonly fail to achieve their objectives. Money is wasted and business owners get cynical.
- On the other side, many business owners have unrealistic expectations of marketing. They don’t understand that marketing is neither black and white nor fast.
I have existed on both sides of this coin personally and continue to do so. I’m a business owner that has been burned by both unrealistic marketers and my own unrealistic expectations.
We’ve also grown through such issues and enjoy ever-increasing levels of success.
Bad Marketers
On the “bad marketers” side I’ve had many experiences that were not excellent…
- They run poorly targeted ads, spend a shit ton of money reaching the wrong audience, and then wonder why it’s not working.
- They fail to understand the details of modern digital platforms and let Google or Facebook run away with the entire budget and then some.
- They fail to understand the audience, the real people that a company sells to. Their copy doesn’t appeal, clicks don’t lead to conversions, and, yet again, money is wasted.
Unrealistic Business Owners
Many business owners and executives don’t “get” marketing. They don’t understand that it takes more time and more money – and more repetitive “impressions” to your target audience – to create real awareness of a brand.
They want to turn on the faucet and get water now, but marketing rarely works that way, particularly in B2B.
Finding Common Ground
What I’ve learned to do is, in my mind, market now for the leads we want 9 – 18 months from now.
Sure, our marketing efforts produce a nice number of “now” leads, and plenty over the course of the coming 9 months, but our push to scale lead generation looks across a much longer time horizon.
And we likely have it worse than you.
I’m the founder and CEO of a marketing automation company called Net-Results. We compete head-to-head with Marketo, Pardot, HubSpot, and others – the biggest names in marketing automation.
In our early days this was tough. Our competitors chose to raise 10’s and 100’s of millions of dollars from investors, and they spent most of it on marketing.
This magnified for me, as the business owner, every mis-step on our end. Whether mine or a marketer’s, time and money spent on marketing that didn’t deliver on expectations led to me looking at marketers with a degree of cynicism.
But time is a great teacher. I’ve gained a better understanding of the cadence of marketing, of the multiple touches across multiple channels that lead to growing brand awareness and opportunity generation.
And we’ve also gotten better at hiring great marketers. I recently wrote an article about the process we use to attract and identify excellent marketing talent. I was lucky that the owner of a marketing agency shared the process with me. It’s saved us a ton of time.
