The Problem with Marketing Best Practices

I'll be honest. Sometimes I struggle to call ClearSound a marketing company because I really dislike some of the common practices in our industry.

When you're getting paid to do certain things, it can be really easy to massage the metrics so you look good. I don't think most agencies set out to do that, but the pull is real, and clients feel it even when they can't name it.

Clients ask for reports for a simple reason: they want to know whether they're getting a good return on their investment. That's a fair question, and it deserves a straight answer.

Marketing leaders feel the same pressure. In Duke University's CMO Survey, they named demonstrating the impact of marketing on financial results as their top challenge.

When every channel hits the industry standard

Here's how it usually goes. A company knows it should be doing social media, so it hires a team to do social media. That team knows what it's doing, and by the industry's standards it performs well.

The same is true for SEO and pay-per-click (PPC). Companies pay thousands of dollars a month to have keywords researched and find out what's most relevant for their website. The reports come back showing an astonishing number of keywords performing well.

The list goes on, from web design to content curation. Every piece has its own best practices and its own report, and every report looks good.

Every report can look good on its own and still not answer the question you're actually asking.

And yet there's a growing frustration, because there's no connection between all that wonderful performance and the results a business can measure on its bottom line.

It happens so often because most marketing metrics are segmented. Each channel is measured on its own terms, which lets a lot of activity happen in isolation from everything else. Social is graded on engagement. SEO is graded on rankings. The website is graded on traffic. Nobody is graded on whether any of it helped the sales team close business.

Analytics expert Avinash Kaushik has a simple test for this. Ask every metric “so what?” three times. If the third answer doesn't lead to an action, he says, “you have the wrong metric. Kill it.”

“We need social media. How much?”

Not long ago, my business partner Derek got a call from a company that said, “We need social media. How much do you charge for social media?”

Derek explained that, at ClearSound, we don't charge anyone for social media until we understand what their goals are and how it fits into a plan that would help them. The caller got frustrated. They just wanted to know what it was going to cost.

Derek tried again. What we'd charge would depend on what was being asked of us, and on how we could help them reach their goals. When he finally hung up that very frustrating call, he realized something: a lot of people are doing marketing activities simply because they know they should be.

That's not a criticism of the caller. It's an honest picture of where a lot of businesses are. Somebody told them they need to be on social media, so they go looking for a price. Nobody has asked them what social media is supposed to do for their business.

We see the same thing with other clients. We've worked with companies paying thousands of dollars every month to content creators, SEO experts, Google Ads specialists, and social media firms, but none of them were working together to accomplish a single goal. Each one was busy. Each one had a report. None of the reports were talking to each other.

We've also worked with clients whose digital marketing firms brought a real level of expertise. They built beautiful websites and helped create content... but those clients still never saw real alignment with their bottom line sales results.

So maybe the problem is a bit deeper.

Usually it isn't the agency's fault

At times it can feel like people are paying thousands of dollars for something that's never going to add up. But that isn't always the agency's fault. Often, these teams are doing exactly what they've been asked to do.

As I dug deeper, I was surprised by how many companies, from small businesses to enterprises, have an internal disconnect between sales and marketing. I assumed it had to be accidental. It isn't always.

In some business models, separating sales and marketing is intentional. Everybody has someone they report to, and sales and marketing often report to different people. We see it in some of our larger B2B clients and in our B2C clients alike. Marketing is measured one way, sales is measured another, and the two rarely sit at the same table.

The research backs this up. When Gartner surveyed 412 senior marketing and sales leaders, it found the two teams typically work together on only three of 15 key commercial activities. Ninety percent said their priorities conflict with one another.

That structure may have made sense once, but it doesn't work in today's marketplace. When it comes to marketing and communication, anything that isn't aligned with sales won't support it.

Think about what that means for the agency: if the marketing team it reports to has never been told what sales is trying to close, the agency can't aim at it either. It will hit the targets it's given, and those targets will be the channel's best practices.

Stale content or scattered content

One of the things we've found in talking with marketing directors across industries is that they often feel a lack of clarity from leadership about what to prioritize.

As with most things, that leads to one of two problems. Either the content goes stale because there's no direction, or the content is all over the place. It's anything but stale, but it never gains traction, because the marketing team has no direction to give it.

Stale content can feel like digging a hole, or a rut at best. Scattered content can feel like going round and round in circles. Neither one is a failure of effort. Both are what happens when the people making the marketing don't know what the business is trying to sell.

It shows up in the numbers too. Forrester has found that 65% of the sales enablement content marketing teams create goes unused.

Connect every piece to the sales goal

The answer is to make sure every piece of content and marketing collateral is connected to the goals of the organization, and specifically to the goals of the sales team.

Sales isn't the only thing that matters. But if you want to show a good return on your marketing, it has to be aligned with the sales goals you're trying to accomplish. The payoff is real: Forrester's research found that companies whose sales, marketing, and product teams are aligned grow revenue 19% faster and are 15% more profitable.

In practice, sales and marketing alignment starts with three things.

These things may seem obvious, but a surprising number of companies never unlock this simple truth.

Report on what the plan is for

Choosing, scheduling, and speaking the same language gives you a unified plan. Two things keep it alive. The first is carrying it out consistently, month after month, long enough for the work to compound. The second is marketing measurement built around the plan instead of the channels.

That's why we build every client's report around their goals, not a vendor template. For one manufacturing client, the report follows the numbers their sales leadership watches: leads passed to the sales team, opportunities, new accounts, and revenue. Rankings, traffic, and engagement still show up, but as the reasons those numbers move, not as the result. That's how 'vanity metrics' become meaningful: we connect them to real goals and objectives. Some numbers we report the way the client asked us to, because their buying cycle runs several months and a single month would tell the wrong story.

A report like that is honest in both directions. When traffic and rankings were climbing but new accounts weren't keeping pace, the report said so and pointed to the handoff between marketing and sales. A report built on best practices would have celebrated the traffic.

A unified plan, carried out consistently and measured against your sales goals. That's what turns marketing activity into real marketing results.

Clarity creates connection

One of the things we emphasize at ClearSound is that clarity creates connection. Alignment between sales and marketing should help you create content that supports your sales team. It should also help you answer bigger questions.

Have we identified the right audience? Have we connected who we are as a company to that audience with meaningful communication? Does that communication show them how we can walk together?

Jay Acunzo, who has written about marketing's best practices problem, puts it well: “Finding best practices isn't the goal. Finding the best approach for you is.”

Best practices can't answer those questions for you. They were never meant to. They're a fine place to start... once you know where you're going.