The research that proves that your marketing is completely wrong

I've just seen a post by Catherine Coale which for some marketers is explosive. It completely contradicts the narrative we are being fed about marketing and in a global pandemic where every $ we spend on marketing counts. It surely must get you sitting up and thinking, "is my marketing working and is it working hard for me?"

The common marketing message, (I interviewed a person in his second year at university who is looking for an internship this week and he is being fed the same message.) is that the place to be is advertising and the place to invest your marketing budget is advertising.

This intern wanted to work in a company where he could grow his Google ads and Facebook ads skills. It wasn't for me to burst his bubble, but let me ask the $64 million question. Does anybody look at ads?

OK, if you are buying $19.99 products off Instagram, yes sure, but B2B Enterprise?

Will a Finance Director buy a $50,000 accounting system from an advert. Come on, it won't happen, and if we read Catherine's research, she has blown this notion out of the water.

Here's Catherine's post

Some context, Telstra Purple (the company that Catherine works for) is transforming their business to use social media as a strategy, rather than a tactic, which is what she means by the term "social organisation".

The team in the pilot; sales people, technical people etc, all write their own posts, we (DLA Ignite) have empowered them to do this as part of our social selling and social influence training and coaching.

What they have found is that people writing their own posts get twice as many likes and four times as many comments than the people who don't. This is more than the latest states from HBR and gartner. She also gives the sample.

This totally blows out of the water, this notion that the brand is everything, that your should spend money on advertising and in fact the whole marketing narrative taught in universities today.

It's worth sharing this piece of the conversation on the blog

Sales and marketing is no longer in advertising, cold calling and email; sales and marketing is on social.

Not in some tactical way, by buying ads or getting people to post corporate content, but by being strategic and empowering people to have buyer centric profiles, to have networks and for the team to be empowered to create authentic, insightful, humanised content.

Finally, I know you have been told that like and comments are vanity metrics, but they are not, but that is a blog for another day.