Why Your Marketing is Hurting Your Sales

I registered for a white paper and got dumped into the email automation bucket. And then the phone calls started.

I registered a domain and the emails poured in. I mark them as a spam and delete them.

I get robo-calls every week especially for Google/SEO pitches.

So why is your marketing so bad? WHY?

At one time, you probably thought: Postcards are expensive. it’s cheap to email, let’s email everyone often.

Then you decided to automate everything. You hired Marketo or Hubspot, uploaded every contact in every database that you had. And let the machine loose.

All of this is why your marketing sucks and isn’t working. Worse you have trained the prospects and consumers to ignore you. Yes, you trained them to ignore you.

They install ad-blockers. You ad technology that gets through it. That is basically saying: We don’t know how to market you except through blunt force. The result will still suck for you! How come you don’t get that?

Marketers automate social media to the point that it is useless. Facebook changes the algorithms to the point that less than 7% of your followers see your stuff and you have to pay Zuck to get them to see it. Twitter is just noise now. The new CEO is going to try to turn that around.

Marketers played games with content and click bait and so much else that Google changed its algorithm three times in three years.

Marketing isn’t a game.

It also isn’t just a broadcast. If you think that works, why not do an infomercial?

It is 16 years since Seth Godin wrote Permission Marketing and still no one gets it.

Just because you have their email address does not mean you can send them stuff.

Attention is precious.

Your job as a marketer is to give value to get their attention. That isn’t easy. And you want easy. And you want a big response. And you are frustrated, so you try to game the system and hack away and push and broadcast. You get a 1%, maybe 2% response rate. Meanwhile, the other 98% dislike you and your brand.

Seth Godin wrote, “Mostly, a brand’s products begin to peak when no one seems to care. Sure, the organization ostensibly cares, but great tools and products and work require a person to care in an apparently unreasonable way.”

He also says that Marketing has to be baked into the product or service. Do we look at it that way? Zappos and Uber used word of mouth — maybe a little network effect – to become household names. Today, I hear people asking for the Uber of this and that.

Pushing your stuff on people doesn’t work. You attract them to you by creating an experience and letting word of mouth take off.

If you want to automate marketing, make it one to one. Personal and valuable and something that matters.

Every day I see marketers ruin it for others. I see why the original title was All Marketers Are Liars. It is plain lazy.

It really comes down to this: are you looking for short term results or building something for the long term?

Tags: advertising, email, marketing, seth, spam
Related tags: godin wrote, marketing, email, marketers, automate, stuff