Everyone's a marketing expert, right? Right?!?

Congratulations you redid your website. You’ve spent a bunch of money with your “web-designer du-jour” because marketing online – well that’s the key to success isn’t it?

You got rid of those stodgy old people in suits around conference tables in all your marketing materials and online – you replaced them with people that have tats and man buns. And of course you launched Insta, FB and X accounts and you're doubling down on LinkedIn with generic polysyllabic words that make it completely unclear what your firm actually does.

It’s all launched – and unfortunately all you have to show for it are a bunch of DMs of people looking for a job (love your new website are you hiring) looking to have you use their services (noticed the new handle we can help promote you )and looking to sell you their products (did you know my XYZ can help your firms grow ABC?) I hear this story almost every time I talk to customers; they spent to evolve and they didn’t get new customers.

Want to know what went wrong? It’s the notion that everyone believes they can do "marketing" (and that they're good at it). Of course, the truth is not so simple. What happened in the real world? Customers increasingly are in charge of their own tech acquisition journeys.

So while all of us were out looking for new ways to get closer to our customers, or looking for ways to use “AI” our customers have decided they want to tell us what they want, they intend to tell us how to provide it, what it should cost, and how and where they should be able to get our offers.

And for the most part they are vendor agnostic – that’s right that loyalty we all counted on for decades…coming to a fast end if we keep doing things the way they’ve always been done. It’s a new digital normal world and if we want to grow, we will have to truly embrace it.

So, what should you have done in the example above? Well, it’s simpler than you might think. You need a new marketing plan, not just a new look and feel. That marketing plan needs to identify your reason for being in a new “customer experience first” marketplace.

Here is the quick summary of what needs to be done:

1. What do you do? What “job” are you hiring me to do for you or your business? Why does it matter? How much does that cost?

2. Why are you relevant? This is some deep stuff and you need to spend real time here and figure out how you can better help or serve customers with quality that matters. Once you do that you can figure out what content is needed to talk about this and then you can be truly relevant. As a bonus it will also seem less like you are marketing every time you are on social media.

3. Find new ways to be discovered – content is king and where you place that content and how it is found is even more critical. Voice, Video and Image search is soaring while traditional search is beginning to lag. You need content in the form of podcasts, YouTube series etcetera to truly stand out

4. Develop a message that matters – not to you but to your customers. This may well be the trickiest part.

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