Businesses make decisions about their marketing all the time. But what are those decisions actually based on?
All too often, decision making in business is done with instinct or preference instead of evidence and objective thinking. Especially when it comes to marketing.
But does that really matter? Isn’t gut instinct a good thing?
The truth is that making uninformed decisions could actually be having a detrimental effect on your business.
Ultimate Guesswork
I saw something on LinkedIn recently, asking if your marketing was aimed at your customers or at your CEO.
It made me smile as it was so familiar.
I’m a huge advocate of a strategy first approach. I’ll go away and do weeks or sometimes months of research, I’ll then use that research to create a strategy that is built solely on objective thinking and then I’ll use my training, experience and the research to put together an action plan aimed at meeting the business’s core objectives.
The CIM states that less than 50% of businesses have a strategy. That means the majority of businesses don’t do the work I do. That can cause several issues.
The biggest issue, of course, is that everything becomes reactive rather than proactive. But even if things are proactive, there is still no research or insight guiding decisions.
Another problem in relation to this is that people forget to walk in their customers’ shoes. Because they haven’t done the necessary research, they end up choosing colours, fonts and styles based on their personal preference. Which can be even worse if the people making those decisions are nothing like the target audience.
And then you have the fact that people often want things to feel comfortable for them. Their instincts inadvertently push things back to a place that feels more familiar. It’s great saying you have excellent gut instinct, but gut instinct is built on the patterns and experiences you have accumulated over time. That can make it incredibly useful, but it also means it will always be influenced by the information and experiences you already have.
Then there are people who look at the competition and do similar things. I think people feel there is something inherently safe in copying the market, even though there may be little evidence that the approach is right for their own business.
When you look at it all together, there is one pattern repeating itself here: people are ultimately guessing.
How Good Are We At Guessing?
You could argue that gut instinct and following the market is a wise choice, especially for a business with tight resources. Going with what feels right and being able to have flexibility feels more reliable than a new strategy, which could be risky.
However, the truth is that there is far less risk in a strategy built on evidence. Gut instinct can point you in the right direction, but it can’t tell you whether you’re right. When I send something out, I never have to cross my fingers and hope I’ve made the right decision. I know why I’ve made it.
A few months ago we exhibited at The Midlands Business Network Expo.
We had a large jar of sweets on our stand and we asked visitors to guess how many were inside. Everyone was looking at exactly the same jar and had exactly the same information available to them.
The guesses ranged from 93 to 3100. The answer was somewhere in between.
I didn’t know until we got back to the office what the guesses had been, and when I looked through I was astounded. People weren’t deliberately making ridiculous guesses. They looked at the jar, considered what seemed reasonable and gave us their answer.
And yet someone thought there were 93 sweets while someone else thought there were more than 3000.
It was only a game, so being wrong didn’t matter. But it did make me think about how often businesses are effectively doing the same thing with their marketing. And when it comes to marketing, there can be thousands of pounds and months of work resting on the answer, not just a jar of sweets.
Understand the Problem
This is one of the reasons why I think businesses can become frustrated with marketing.
They try something that seems like a perfectly good idea and if it doesn’t deliver the results they expected in a short amount of time, they change it, stop doing it or move onto something else.
The issue is, though, that the idea that generated all the work was just an idea. It wasn’t a formulated plan and it wasn’t built on evidence.
How many of these questions do you answer before deciding what marketing activity to execute?
What does the business actually need to achieve?
Are you targeting the right segments?
Is your positioning strong enough?
How are people currently interacting with you?
Has something changed within the market?
Until you understand the problem, choosing the solution is inevitably going to involve a degree of guesswork.
And just like our jar of sweets, what feels like a perfectly reasonable answer can still be nowhere near the right one without all the relevant information to hand.
Remove the Guesswork
This is why at Lindsay Woodward Marketing we insist on a strategy first approach.
Strategy gives you the opportunity to step back before deciding what you are going to do. It looks at what the business wants to achieve, where it currently sits, what is happening in the market, who it needs to reach and what might prevent it from getting where it wants to go.
Only once you understand all of that can you make informed decisions about what your marketing actually needs to look like.
It doesn’t mean every decision will automatically be right. Marketing doesn’t work like that. Trial and error has always been an important part of marketing, and I think it always will be.
But there is a huge difference between testing an idea because your research and strategy have given you good reason to believe it could work, and trying something because it seems like a good idea.
How Much Are You Leaving To Chance?
There will always be some uncertainty in marketing. No amount of research, strategy or experience can guarantee exactly how people will behave or what will happen next.
But that doesn’t mean we should simply accept guesswork as part of the process.
The more information you have, the clearer your objectives are and the better you understand the market you are operating in, the more informed your decisions become. And once you start measuring what happens, every piece of activity should give you more information to work with next time.
At our expo, getting the answer wrong meant you didn’t win a jar of sweets.
When you’re making decisions about your marketing, getting it wrong can mean wasted budget, wasted time and missed opportunities.
So perhaps it’s worth asking: how much of your marketing is based on what you know, and how much is still based on what you think?
At Lindsay Woodward Marketing, we help businesses take the guesswork out of their marketing by developing clear strategies built around what they actually want to achieve.
If you’d like to explore how a strategy could benefit your business, then please get in touch.