Fix THIS Before Spending Another Penny On Marketing Tactics

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In the past week alone, 3 companies have asked my company, Bixa, if we can help them find an influencer to help market their respective brands.

A quick discussion in each of these cases made it clear that they were grasping at straws. Determined to increase their bottom line, they had turned to marketing tactics instead of marketing strategy.

In each of these cases, they had decided that influencer marketing was the tactic de jour—before they had even really figured out who their customers were. 

Look, I fully acknowledge that influencer marketing is such a BIG thing right now—and it’s certainly a tactic I encourage companies to think about in my book InstaBrain: The New Rules for Marketing to Generation Z. Plus, more than ever, we’re seeing even nano-influencers with just a thousand followers deliver crazy ROI to the right kind of businesses.

All true. But you know what else is true? 

If you put influencer marketing before understanding WHO your customers are, WHERE they struggle, WHAT they need, WHEN they need it, and HOW they want to experience it… you might as well take a stack of hundred-dollar bills, walk to a toilet on the marketing department floor, fling those crispy notes haphazardly in the bowl and flush them down the drain pipes. 😱

Okay, maybe that was a bit of hyperbole. But you get the picture, right? 

Years ago, companies operated in a way where you could buy a TV ad, and it would guarantee you business. I mean, even “Better Call Saul” on Netflix can teach you that. But with the distribution of media—and the distribution of where customer eyeballs in 2022 are looking all day long—there’s no longer any guarantee that $1 you spend will bring you anything in return.

In the midst of defending basic market research on these calls, I came across this article from Marketing Week that struck me as spot-on when the author declared:

“Marketing has changed more in the last five years than in the previous 50. We are a profession that sucks deep from the cigarette of change and exhales large clouds of noxious bullshit to obscure what marketing is still all about.”

Just because influencer marketing—or any other tactic for that matter—is working for other companies doesn’t mean it’s the best tactic for your business. And what those calls this week meant to me is that for many companies, we need to go back to basics.

We need to focus on….

YOUR CUSTOMERS!

Who they are, how they think, how they perceive brands, what’s happening in their worlds, how they shop and transact and pay…. the list goes on. 

We must stop looking at demographics alone and shift to psychographics and behavioral segmentation. We need to focus on the customer lifetime value—and how we can expand lifespan—instead of just persuading someone to buy once.

By caring more about who your customers are, more than where your next dollar should go, you’ll get a customer-focused strategy that will lead directly to the precise tactics that will resonate with your target audience segments—and influencer marketing may or may not be in that mix.

So let’s go back to basics and learn about our customers. Only then can we craft the perfect multi-channel strategy. Only then can we start to talk about our tactics. 

Want more of this marketing goodness?

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If you liked this article, you might like my blog post on 5 Marketing Strategies to Boost Engagement, Sales, and ROI With Your Buyer Personas.

Sarah Weise is the CEO of award-winning marketing research agency Bixa and the bestselling author of InstaBrain: The New Rules for Marketing to Generation Z. For 15 years, Sarah has been a guide to hundreds of leading brands, including Google, IBM, Capital One, Mikimoto, PBS, and U.S. Army, to name a few. Sarah helps brands achieve a laser focus on their customers and build experiences that are downright addictive. She lectures at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and speaks at conferences and corporate events worldwide.