Can anyone do marketing?
We work under many different guises for clients. Sometimes we are their marketing ‘outsource’ department, sometimes we are their ‘go to’ people for strategic and tactical advice, sometimes we are their marketing experts for campaigns.
The success of marketing is about targeting the right people with the right message in the right way at the right time. So anyone can do this, right? With the introduction of easy-to-use email broadcast programmes, simple Google Pay Per Click platforms and Facebook advertising opportunities thrown at you every time you log in, the barriers to entry are low for marketing activity and in theory, anyone can do this. However, let’s not kid ourselves, this isn't marketing, it's implementation. The main barrier to entry still exists and that's marketing know-how.
In some instances, clients see what we do and then go off and do it themselves. That's all well and good. They do exactly the same things – emarketing, social media, reputation management. It looks like they’re doing the same things but then they call us - they just aren’t getting the same results. That’s because marketers spend a long time testing calls to action, buzz words, colour schemes, information display, styles of copy which is the difference between success and failure. It's not what you do, it’s how you do it.
A familiar scenario is Google Pay Per Click where clients have tried to do it themselves only to see their marketing budget disappear before their eyes with no results. It’s a complex process understanding keywords, bidding, calls to action and landing pages that make a successful campaign. Of course Google and Yahoo! are going to oversimplify it so anyone feels they can participate.
There are many traps out there which make it easy for non-marketers to hand over their credit card details, set up campaigns and feel like this marketing lark is easy. That is until you’re several hundreds of pounds worse off with no results, saying things like ‘PPC doesn’t work for us’, ‘Facebook advertising doesn’t work for us’, ‘emarketing doesn’t work for us’. All our campaigns deliver results and will ultimately save you money – so the question still remains to be answered, can everyone do marketing?