There are some areas in marketing where we can get lost in the way we think, fooling ourselves into believing we have accomplished something big when we have not. The goal of any marketing plan is to lead to a sale. But too often, marketing loses its way and there is no return on the investment of time and money. It leads many to declare that marketing is a huge money pit. But not everything is as it seems.

Several years ago I was on vacation with my family in the Orlando, Florida area. One place I had been dying to visit was Gatorland. As the name implies, this is a huge alligator zoo, with gators of every size. I had been to Gatorland as a child and wanted to complete some kind of crazy family circle by taking my children there too. They indulged me. As we were paying the admission to get in, the nice lady at the ticket window asked if I would like to wrestle a gator during a demonstration for an additional $5. My kids thought I should, so I put down a Lincoln and received a ticket. We were directed to a small arena with a sandy island surrounded by a shallow pool full of alligators. We waited for the show to start and I began to get a little nervous. These were not small alligators. When the show began, two staffers entered the little island arena and began to tell us all about alligators. At one point, one of them grabbed a seven foot gator by the tail and pulled it into the middle of the arena. He then asked anyone with a wrestling ticket to form a line. I reluctantly got behind a boy who was about five years old. The staffer jumped on the gators back to demonstrate what we would be doing. He then grabbed the gator’s head and held its mouth shut. He explained that alligators have enormously strong jaws that can snap a bone in one bite. However, they have very little strength when it comes to opening their mouth. As long as you hold the mouth shut, it can’t bite you. Of course, as soon as you let go, it can open up and bite your arm off. To make sure that all of the "wrestlers” made it back to their seats with their limbs intact, they taped the beast’s mouth closed with electrical tape. When each of us got our photo taken, we were instructed to hold the gator’s head at the tape. That way the photo they took of me looked like I had truly wrestled the giant gator into submission and was keeping those mighty jaws shut with my own hands. Not everything is as it seems.

Beyond deceptive alligator wrestling photography, let me highlight a few of the areas in marketing where we can get fooled and think we are being successful when we are not. The first area is getting drunk on the creative process that surrounds much of what we do in marketing. It is just ten days until the Super Bowl, complete with some of the best (and worst) TV ads of the year. Corporations pay big bucks for a thirty second spot during the Super Bowl (nearly $4 million this year) and even more for the creative expertise of an advertising agency to come up with the idea and put it all together. The creative process is very alluring. YouTube has turned rank amateurs with a video camera and too much time on their hands into social media heroes. It is so easy to fall in love with the creative process that you can miss the goal of being creative in an ad. Advertising is made to make you remember a brand, to like the brand and to take some action to get closer to buying the product. You can make someone laugh until they fall down, but if they don’t remember your brand at the end of 30 seconds, the laugh is on you. If they don’t take action on the message you just gave them, it is all an expensive experiment in futility. Watch the Super Bowl commercials and see how much you remember about them by the end of the night.

On the other end of the spectrum from the creative are the stats. Another area where we can fool ourselves in marketing is getting too enamored with the analytics that we miss our target market. Let me explain what I mean. You may have a web site that gets a million visits a day. However, are those visits in your target market? Dig a little deeper in the numbers. Many analytics software count automated processes, like web crawlers – spiders and bots in particular – as visitors to the site. Make sure you are separating out these automated visits from real human engagement. Also, where are those visits coming from? Your analytics software should give you a state-by-state breakdown of the traffic on your site. If you are not selling to anyone in Wyoming, but a good portion of your web traffic is coming from there, you are missing your target. But beyond the hard stats kept on your web site, we can get so focused on the large numbers that we forget to have human interaction with a person. You will find out more about the effectiveness of your marketing by sitting down with your customers than you will ever find out from the stats. For most of us, buying is a very personal thing. Nothing beats a human touch.

There is one more area of deception that I must highlight, because we live in a very electronically connected and impersonal world. Likes on your social media do not translate into sales. There is value in having social media engagement with your target market. It is something special when one of your customers gives you the thumbs up. However, your marketing to sales process cannot stop with a like on social media. How often do you follow up with the people who engage with your social media posts? Knowing that they like something should be an open door for you to call on them, to make sure they are completely satisfied with your company’s performance and to give them a reason to buy from you again.

In marketing, it is easy to think we have conquered the quest before the sale happens. Make sure you are not deceiving yourself by getting lost with your marketing tools. In the end, the creative, the analytics, the social media engagement and everything else we do in marketing are just methods that lead to a sale.

____________________

Photo by Bobak Ha'Eri