Marketing is like a Swiss Army knife: it involves many tools. From convincing, converting, and keeping clients to creating strong emotional connections, marketing tiptoes around virtually every growth factor in your business. For B2B brands, marketing is often seen as a way to reach specific decision-makers and lead them down the gently-laid brick road to sales. But what if everything you thought you knew about marketing was, well… totally wrong?
What if marketing isn’t just about securing leads, driving sales, and statistic-laden blog posts? Here are 8 common misconceptions about marketing that you need to avoid. Get ready to rethink everything you thought you knew about the constantly overused and sometimes abused word “marketing.”
Misconception #1:
Marketing is All About Lead Gen
Yes, leads are important, but marketing doesn’t do its best work if the only goal is to get more leads for the sales funnel.
It may sound counterintuitive, but the goal of marketing has never been to simply find fodder for the sales team. In fact, leads are just one small part of the marketing playbook. Modern marketing is a complex, multi-layered behemoth that drives energy and success into various pillars of your business.
As an example, branding isn’t a traditional lead gen tool; it’s a mid-horizon growth tool that lets your brand live rent-free in people’s heads. While you can certainly measure the success of branding across a variety of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), lead gen isn’t distinctly among them. On the other end of the spectrum, local SEO — which works great for B2B brands with a physical storefront — is a sales generation strategy, not just a lead gen technique. In fact, 18% of local searches lead to a sale within a day of the search, so these are often people who are purchase-ready and able to jump through the funnel without requiring that capable sales touch.
To be clear, we aren’t saying that leads aren’t a critical part of marketing. They absolutely are. But they aren’t the only value that marketing provides to your business. If you think of your marketing strategy as lead-centric, you’re going to miss some of those other healthy marketing mechanisms. Case in point, Walker says that brand has overtaken both price and product as the key differentiator between brands. A significant chunk of marketing provides intangibles, like brand recognition, emotional connections, and consumer data.
Misconception #2:
Success Can Always Be Measured in ROI
It’s easy to measure ad campaign success in ROI. But what about branding? How do you measure return on a long-term strategy that involves so many touchpoints?
In general, marketing strategies deal with three massive KPI issues:
- Cost of opportunity: Let’s say that your latest marketing campaign produces an ROI of 1.3. That’s not bad! But what if you had invested the money from that campaign into sales; would your returns have been higher? How do you measure the cost of opportunity? How do you prove that your investing resources in the right area?
- Value of intangibles: Branding is (in our humble opinion) the single biggest driver of marketing. Consistent branding across channels boosts bottom-line revenue by 23%, and ~90% of marketers admit that brand awareness is their single biggest goal. So… how do you measure “brand awareness?” Is it traffic? If so, how do you prove the uptick in traffic came from branding — not organic growth?
- Return: What is the ROI for branding? Better yet, what’s the ROI for top-funnel strategies that take weeks, months, or years to produce results? How do you even prove that your bottom-funnel strategy is the cause of a conversion?
Yeah! It’s tricky, right? There are absolutely areas in marketing that can be easily measured in ROI. But others can be more difficult to pinpoint. Instead, you have to rely on in-depth reporting, alternative metrics, and cross-ROI (i.e., campaign performance is going up after a round of brand awareness) to help solve the puzzle.
This is an area where having a boutique agency or consultants really helps out. You need someone who deeply understands your company to dissect your entire funnel and deliver value across channels that’s measurable — whether or not that measurability is purely ROI-driven.
Misconception #3:
XYZ Platform/Strategy/Channel Will Totally Solve Our Problems
See the problem? Every week we see a new study, a new blog, or a new professional take on the biggest, brightest, and most impactful marketing strategy/channel/platform that you have to use.
Are you ready for a hot take? None of those platforms are “the best.” In fact, we would argue that relying solely on any one of those platforms is a horrible marketing strategy.
There aren’t any shortcuts in marketing. You can’t push your budget into a platform silo and expect to reap sweet rewards. It’s all about the journey. Effective marketing strategies combine multiple platforms, content types, strategies, and execution layers.
You want to create amazing content, push it out through multiple channels, pay attention to SEO, brand effectively, and align goals effectively. Remember the old adage about eggs and baskets? It’s true.
Misconception #4:
Marketing & Sales Expenses Should Share A Budget
Sales and marketing alignment is the talk-of-the-town. It makes sense, right? They’re both working towards a similar goal: winning people over. But let’s take a step back. Remember myth #1? Marketing isn’t just chasing those tasty leads, and not all marketing strategies are built to directly sell your product/service. So, why would you combine budgets?
We love the core message behind aligning marketing and sales. Both teams play off of each other’s successes and failures, and both have a vested interest in growing your business. But they’re both going about their jobs differently. Trying to combine budgets strips each team of their independent value, and may convince you to drive budgeting into ROI-only campaigns.
Instead, align sales and marketing in terms of strategy and collaboration. Each team is trying to unlock a different value lever. They need space to do this without pitting them against each other for a share of the resources.
This brings us to our next misconception…
Misconception #5:
Marketing Exists to Support Sales
Should marketing support sales? Absolutely!
Is that your marketing team’s primary role? Definitely not.
Your marketing team is juggling a variety of responsibilities. Chiefly among them, retention, attraction, and branding. These exist outside of the sales landscape. Now. Let’s clarify something: the sales team needs to have input and influence on marketing strategy. They aren’t just fodder, and marketing efforts directly impact their ability to be successful. However, marketing and sales both exist to support each other AND drive unique value to your business. They need to collaborate, and they need to support each other. But they also need to operate independently and produce their own results.
Marketing should market marketing, and sales should sell sales. In other words, both departments need to consistently prove the value of their efforts, how those efforts help each other, and how each of their roles provides unique value/growth to the overall business. But neither unit is built solely to provide value to the other unit.
Misconception #6:
Marketing Is A Department
Since marketing and sales are operating on two different budgets, that makes them completely autonomous departments, doesn’t it? So, why not just shove marketing in a windowless room and let them rip-and-tear their way through some social platforms? After all, we just said that marketing doesn’t exist solely to support sales (and vice-versa).
Marketing is an organization-wide effort. It takes a village. Everyone in your business is part of your brand. The things they say and do reflect on your business, and how they carry themselves, and the voice they use to communicate with clients is a reflection of your overall brand identity.
Yes. Employees should be actively advocating for your brand & customer solutions, but it goes beyond that. You want to create a magnetic brand identity that resonates with employees. Everyone should be on the same page — both in terms of what they’re doing to actively promote your brand and how they carry themselves while they’re on-the-clock.
Misconception #7:
Corporate Decision-Making Is Just Business
Leather-wrapped chairs, dark-stained wooden desks, columns of bookshelves stuffed with business reads, and suits-and-ties litter the B2B marketing aesthetic. We all like to imagine B2B as this hyper-professional, no-nonsense ecosystem that requires a special, impersonal touch.
But here’s the big secret: B2B purchasers are 50% more likely to buy a product when they see personal value, and they’re 8x more likely to pay a premium for your product/service. Sometimes, we forget that B2B decision-makers are people.
Sure. B2B sales often go through a battery of touchpoints before closing. Decision-makers, C-level, purchasing committees, consultants, procurement frameworks, and boardroom meetings are all regular fare in the B2B buying process. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t still dealing with people. And people are emotional beings.
In fact, we would make the argument that B2B is potentially even more of an emotional purchasing decision than a simple B2C transaction; the political capital your customers spend to secure budget approval and gain buy-in across the org is a risk to reputation, livelihood, and future earning potential riding on software selection & implementation.
We aren’t saying that you should throw the script out and start pushing out comedy-first advertisements or nonsensical campaigns. But don’t create bland, generic campaigns with stock images that are void of emotion. There’s a happy-place that lies between the two & helps you make a reassuring, trust-building emotional connection with your customers. Aim for it.
Misconception #8:
But… Gary Vee, Seth Godin, and Neil Patel Said “X” On Such-And-Such Podcast
The once-sheltered marketing ecosystem has gone mainstream. Neil Patel runs one of the most successful blogs on the internet. Gary Vaynerchuck has ~3 million YouTube subscribers, and Seth Godin has sold millions of books and dominated the talk circuit for years. To be clear, these are all fantastic marketing personalities that provide tangible value to their hordes of results-hungry fans. But they aren’t perfect, and they don’t know your business.
There’s no such thing as plug-and-play marketing strategies. Gary Vee may give a 30-minute talk about how “you have to be on Facebook.” But what if your target audience isn’t really paying attention to that platform? There are plenty of marketers giving advice, but they aren’t giving you-centric advice. Marketing strategies should be purpose-built for your brand, not gathered from a trendy blog post or YouTube video.
You Need a One-in-a-Million Strategy
Marketing isn’t a siloed lead-gen machine that uses plug-and-play strategies to drive hyper-digestible ROI into your business. It’s a wholly-transformative, growth-producing business unit that requires careful attention to strategy, metrics, and results. The goal of marketing goes well beyond leads. It positions your brand as a differentiator and helps you grow into the amazing business you were meant to be.
Are you tired of gimmicky marketing strategies, run-of-the-mill content, and same-old ads? We can help. BrandSyntax is a boutique marketing solution that caters to growth-hungry B2B brands. We keep our client list small, and our attention heavy. Contact us to learn more.
