The Most Dangerous Opinion in Marketing: Yours

How does your opinion influence your marketing activity?

  • Has your opinion ever biased your creative selection?
  • Has your personal experience with social media increased your perception of its marketing value?
  • Do your watching and reading habits influence the publishers you advertise with?

The Problem: Your Perspective

You are not selling to yourself. Your opinion of creative, media or content is a distraction. Your audience’s perspective is the only one that matters.

Further proof that marketers are different: The infographic below, originally created by Heat, highlights just how extreme some of the differences are.

  • 71% of marketers pay attention to brands’ feeds “all the time” on Facebook, versus just 23% of normal people (also known as your audience).
  • 31% of those same normal people disagree that brands should invest into their customers in social media, versus just 6% of marketers.

The differences are extreme. As a marketer, simply getting to know your audience is not enough. It doesn’t matter how much research and persona development you do. Once you are done, you are just a slightly smarter version of the same you.

The Solution: Test Ruthlessly

Your research data is accurate. Your initial interpretation and application likely is not. To improve your marketing, ruthlessly test your assumptions and findings.

Today, particularly for B2B marketers focused on driving engagement online, tests are relatively simple to execute. There are a number of tools available that make testing in online marketing easier, cheaper, or both. For example:

Landing Page Testing: Google Website Optimizer, Unbounce.
Search Testing: Google Adwords (campaign experiments are particularly useful for testing)
Banner Creative Testing: Flite (simple creative testing and dynamic creative)
Email Testing: Even a free MailChimp account supports A/B testing and every commercial ESP supports testing.

Your Turn

How else do you see marketer’s own views and assumptions undermine marketing? Share your opinion in the comments below or with me on Twitter (@wittlake).

Infographic created by Heat and published here on Co.CREATE

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