Frequently Asked Questions

Marketing is often unplugged from sales, not tied to the revenue center of the company, and fraught with issues of power and accountability.

The Trap: An autonomous marketing department IS a silo. It drains revenue but does not participate in increasing it. Therefore, from a strictly fiduciary perspective, it has no value.

On top of that: When it's left solely in the hands of specialists, and doesn't bring the broader organization together around company campaigns, activating internal brand advocates to champion the cause, it can't achieve the momentum needed to beat competitors who also have marketing specialists.

Solution: Create sales-marketing alignment, and place marketing in the service of sales. Utilize marketing as a base to create brand advocacy across departmental boundaries.

Successful companies spend money on marketing, and we assume that their marketing efforts are WHY they're succeeding. It is often the case they BECAME successful first, and for other reasons, and that gives momentum to their marketing—not the other way around.

The trap: Your company mimics competitors' marketing strategies, thinking they are a pathway to catching up. But you never do.

Solution: Do the thing the competitors WON'T do.

The company tries to act (essentially) as a news/publishing outlet, creating generic industry content on the justification that it demonstrates credibility. Generic = primarily informative and barely mentions (or doesn't) that the company actually sells anything. Sometimes the logic is even, "Let's become the industry's main news source."

The Trap: The company is NOT a publication—it will never become the Huffington Post of its industry, because that's not its core revenue model, and it takes 100% focus to actually run a publication, let alone a profitable one. The intended audience praises the material, which feels good. But the fundamental sales argument is not being made, and the initiative fails to build an active, thriving audience of brand champions who buy from and refer the company.

Solution: Make industry leadership the premise for your content campaign.

Somewhere, there's a blog post entitled "10 Things You Should Be Doing in Your Marketing". It's a collection of best practices anyone can Google and learn. Except the writer doesn't know anything about YOUR business, so it implies that one size fits all (i.e. there's a template for marketing).

The Trap:

1. The template was created by marketing consultants, primarily to ease their burden and sell more marketing consulting. Just like therapy can often discover the need for more therapy.
2. Anyone can Google and learn those things, so they are the most commodified strategies with the *least* competitive value. Everyone has the same game plan, so it's neutralized.
3. If there's a template created by marketing experts, why do we need marketing experts? Just fire them and use their template! Or hand your team a book—any marketing book.
4. The difference between info you can Google and decades of experience is nuance and context. Your marketing strategy needs to align with company revenue goals—a generic template just spends money for nothing.

Solution: Never accept a prescription without a diagnosis. Make anyone giving you marketing advice explain why it's right for YOUR company in particular, without reference to any other companies.

Most training consists of info, concepts, and tasks that the consultant knows your team can't implement effectively by themselves. It's designed not to 'transfer' expertise but to sell more services. It's priced affordably because it's a loss leader.

The Trap: Instead of being customized to company goals, training is often a collection of "tips" and "best practices" that could just as easily have been a blog article.

Solution: Make the training utilize real-world company examples.

Most marketing reports consist of:

1. At best: mistaken or knee-jerk analysis that doesn't convey enough nuance about what the numbers really mean. For instance, does the bounce rate on a page mean the page is no good or that the marketing campaign that is linking to it is no good, or else that it's a normal increase from doing marketing in the first place? 
2. At worst: selective data reporting, fluff and feel-good numbers with no close tie to revenue, and not a lot of actionable/useful analysis. What exactly is the value of a 'follower' or a 'like'? What percentage of those outcomes results in a conversion? Are we measuring conversions and, if so, what counts as a conversion? Are the conversions related to a campaign uptick or a seasonal spike?

The trap: You make decisions on which efforts to support or drop based on inadequate information. Even if you move the needle, you don't know if it's the right needle, because it's buried in arcane jargon that doesn't convey where it aligns with sales.

Solution: Always ask: what is the value of a particular metric.

The company invests a disproportionate amount of its marketing resources (budget, time, attention) in producing a website. The belief is that the website will generate additional leads and is key to the company's growth.

The Trap: The more resources the company devotes, the more it develops an unspoken belief that launching the new website will create additional business. There's an immense letdown when discovering: a) It won't. It may merely *enable* the creation of new business. b) There's insufficient remaining time, money, and focus to engage in the kind of aggressive marketing and additional sales activity needed to produce that business.

Solution: Treat the website as a piece of sales collateral (it won't make the sale for you); prioritize using it to help you sell and close deals; Sales should run the project—get it to 'done' in the most efficient way possible (e.g. using Agile methodology); simultaneously create a multi-channel marketing plan around the near-finished material.

The company employs an internal narrative about digital that says 'we don't really understand it' or imbues it with mystique. As a result, we look for new rules that do not originate in our 'normal', non-digital experiences. We try to reinvent the way people interact and can prioritize trivial mannerisms like "Never post on Wednesdays" or "Nothing in capital letters." Just as some of us who are more socially starchy might repeatedly confirm the time and place of a first date.

The Trap: We forego the opportunities for genuine human connections via digital and turn our digital strategy into a series of formulaic 'best practices' that have more in common with manipulating a capricious MACHINE than engaging human beings.

The Solution: As a Digital Ecologist®, MadPipe's founder takes the attitude that the best template for how digital ecologies operate is that of natural/human ecosystems. Tony Soprano's mom hilariously would not answer the phone after dark. But she has a point—people remain people, even when using a digital device. So utilize what we know about building healthy relationships and ecosystems in general to shape your digital strategy. Important shifts like round-the-clock access are the details but not the endgame itself.

Recognizing the role emotions play in business is a fairly new phenomenon in professional settings, but it acknowledges that the barriers to our goals are often not purely intellectual or physical. We might struggle with control, status, or confidence in ways that hold us back and can only be addressed through transformative learning (vs. merely informative learning).

The Trap: We don't address the underlying causes of not achieving what we want. Whether we avoid it out of decorum, to save face, or to preserve relationships, this actually strengthens the boundaries that keep us disempowered (and disconnected), and it sublimates the conversations we would need to be having to reach orbital velocity on our goals.

Solution: Make it safe to acknowledge the emotional content of our work at work and acceptable to give and receive input on the emotions that contribute to or distract from our respective missions and personal objectives as professionals.

Side Note: Star Trek the Next Generation dared to introduce a wide audience to this idea in a professional setting. The inclusion of characters Counselor Troi (representing the conviction that our professional goals are rooted in our personal ontological framework) and Lieutenant Barclay shown in this video—who goes from uncomfortable struggles for advancement to near godhood—is an acknowledgment that it's now acceptable to discuss motivations—our internal dialogue and our ultimate aspirations for fulfillment.