The Big Bubble Gallery, #36

“Marketers in the high-tech world who use phrases such as “social media marketing,” “Facebook marketing” and “content marketing” do not understand the basic difference between marketing strategies, marketing channels and marketing content. And Google Analytics is to blame. In the just over 10 years since the release of the platform in November 2005, too many tech marketers now ignore the difference between strategies and channels, favor digital channels that often deliver lower returns than traditional channels and think that direct responses are the only useful ROI metric. And all of that is wrong. Imagine that it is the 1990s and I want to reach the people who watch “Friends” on television. (…) I could run an advertisement during an episode of “Friends.” I could pay NBC to have the coffee house hold an event that would feature my product in an episode. I could hire a “Friends” actor to appear in an infomercial that would air directly after an episode. And so on. Now, none of this would be “television marketing” because “television marketing” is not a “thing.” “Television” is a marketing channel, not a marketing strategy. If I choose to advertise on television, “advertising” is the strategy, the advertisement itself is the content and “television” is the channel over which I transmit the advertisement. In the same way, “Facebook marketing,” “social media marketing” and “content marketing” are not “things.” “Facebook” is a marketing channel. “Social media” is a collection of marketing channels. “Content” is a tactic, not a strategy. “Content” is produced in the execution of strategies such as advertising, SEO and publicity. Why is this important? The terms that we use reflect the assumptions that underlie our approaches to marketing — and bad assumptions lead to bad marketing at best, and spam at worst. This is what I believe that Mark Ritson meant when he wrote his recent, controversial Marketing Week column stating that marketers need real marketing qualifications. After all — and as I think Ritson was implying — too many online marketers do not know basic principles such as the few that I have mentioned so far. And it was the introduction of Google Analytics that led to these poor assumptions and this bad terminology today. (…) There is actually no such thing as “digital PR.” It’s just “PR.” The best publicity practices to get coverage never change, regardless of the channels over which the coverage will appear. (…)There is no “digital marketing” and “traditional marketing.” There is only marketing — just ask Campbell’s, which has now consolidated all offline and online work under the CMO. (…) Google transformed the marketing industry. However, the introduction and widespread adoption of GA pushed marketers to change their focus from the strategy to the channel. Traditional marketing allocates activities based on the strategies that comprise the traditional Promotion Mix: direct marketing, advertising, personal selling, sales promotion and publicity. Google Analytics replaced those “buckets” with these entirely new ones: direct, organic search, social, referral, paid search, email and display. However, that shift in assumption has led to poor marketing because almost any strategy can be executed over any channel — and it is strategies, not channels, that have associated best practices and deliver results. Take “social media marketing,” a vague, useless phrase that refers to channels but not to any specific strategy: (…) when a term means everything, it means nothing. (…) To ask “What is the ROI of social media?” makes as much sense as asking “What’s the ROI of the telephone?” Activities, not channels, generate ROI. But after Google Analytics and every other marketing platform defined “social media” and other channels as buckets, and therefore as marketing strategies, people have confused strategies and channels ever since. The positive thing about GA is that we can know which channels tend to perform the best. The negative thing about GA is that we know less about which specific, overall strategies and activities over those channels lead the best results. Google Analytics did not only confuse marketers in terms of the difference between strategies and channels — the platform also trapped our industry into focusing more and more on digital channels at the expense of offline ones. Of course, GA can be a very useful tool. The basic version is free, so it is no wonder that countless tech startups use the platform. But it comes with a limitation: It can only track online channels. If someone, for example, runs a television advertisement, he will see zero information in Google Analytics on the results that he can attribute directly to the advertisement. So, people now have a subconscious bias toward using online channels — just like everyone else in the tech world. (…) The more we rely on Google Analytics, the more we will use strategies such as direct marketing over AdWords that are easily trackable in GA rather than strategies that are less trackable — as I will explain below. (…) Direct marketing is the most annoying form of marketing over any channel. It’s the junk mail that people throw away. It’s the automated email spam that is now called “lead nurturing.” It’s the ads that interrupt you on social networks when you’re trying to connect with friends and family. It’s having the same advertisement follow you around the internet. For all of the excitement over the rise of so-called marketing automation platforms, people should realize that all these platforms do is send and resend all of this direct-response material based on a predefined timetable and workflow. There is absolutely no creativity — and creativity is what builds brands and sells products. People tolerate offline advertising and publicity campaigns — and they even fondly remember the few that are the most creative. But people hate online advertising — which is actually almost always direct marketing by another name — and increasingly rush to block it however possible. The online advertising industry is committing slow suicide through the use of intrusive platforms that are so invasive that people are choosing to block ads altogether. Direct marketing may be the most annoying form of marketing, but it is the strategy whose direct ROI is the easiest to track. (…) A focus only on GA metrics often leads startups to move toward publishing not informational material but rather more and more “clickbait.” And clickbait might get more traffic, but will only reflect poorly on the brand and cause other damage, as well. Besides, the number of pageviews is a useful metric only for websites whose main business model is online advertising (such as news websites), because each page view sends a server request for ad impressions. Companies, on the other hand, whose goal is to obtain more customers, often see that clickbait delivers a lot of traffic but fewer conversions in the end. (…) But the problem is when online marketers often drink their own digital Kool-Aid, ignore traditional channels and exaggerate the effectiveness of modern channels. (…) Remember Oreo’s famous Super Bowl tweet? Ritson ran all of the numbers and calculated that it was seen by less than 1 percent of Oreo’s target market. And that example is held up as “social media marketing” at its very best. In another example from Hoffman, Pepsi lost enough market share to drop to third when it moved its budget from TV to social media. But social media consultants and agencies are always going to say that “social media is the answer,” because their livelihoods depend on it. (…) Digital video platforms are always going to claim that “TV is dying” because their success depends on it — even though TV has never been more popular than it is today. Few take the time to research the facts, and instead just regurgitate whatever spews forth from the digital marketing echo chamber. And most people are selling something”. (Samuel Scott, How Google Analytics Ruined Marketing, TechCrunc.com, August 8, 2016)