The Best Way to Suck at Marketing – Whiteboard Friday

Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I wanted to talk about something I see from a lot of marketers where we just kill ourselves, people. We’re dying. We’re really sucking at our jobs, and the reason seems to be very consistent. It seems like this is almost the best way, the most popular way to suck at marketing. I’ll show you what I’m talking about.

So here’s our marketer, and he or she has good intentions in mind, but he goes out and looks at every opportunity with the same lens on. So goes out and looks at partnerships and sees only the possibility of business development. Goes out and looks at other blogs and other places in the industry where they might contribute and sees only a guest post opportunity, a chance to earn a link. Goes and looks at their landing pages and sees customers, potential customers coming to their site and thinks only: “How many? What’s the highest percent of those people that I can possibly convert to put in their credit card right now and buy something or make a transaction happen?”

They look at conferences and events and see only, “All right, how do I speak there?” Or “Should I sponsor it?” And “How do I get the most customers I possibly can out of that event? How do I get coverage from press, media, and bloggers? How do I turn this advertising placement into ROI? How do I turn these people on social media, who are interested in my topic, into people who follow me, become my customers, and amplify my content?”

This transactional model of thinking is actually really similar to how we do a lot of discussion in the marketing field. I’m guilty of this myself. I talk about: “Oh, well, if you’re looking for folks on social media, how do you turn them into followers of yours? How do you turn them into amplifiers?”

These are important topics. They’re good tactics, but this view, this idea that all these people are just a chance to make money, just an opportunity, it’s almost like the prostitution of marketing. If you think about the difference between dating and paying for a physical relationship, they’re thought of in such different ways. One has all sorts of positive and romantic and long-term associations in the world, and the other has incredibly negative connotations. I won’t get into the morality of our different views on these things, but this same thinking applies in the marketing world. We’ve all been on the receiving end of it. We’ve all been these people who are reached out to by this transactional marketer.

Transactional marketing results in only one thing — transactional relationships. Those transactional relationships are representative because every interaction is viewed exclusively through this “how are you going to become money for me,” which is an ugly, ugly way to think and an ugly way to be thought of. We all can feel it when it’s coming from someone else. It means treating people merely as conduits. They’re conduits for either attracting or becoming customers. When you think in this model, you prioritize something that’s actually dangerous to your long-term success — your short-term success.

It’s funny how the inverse correlation works. But if you’re constantly focused on the short-term return over the long-term relationship or relationship potential, the transactional model means that people and customers are going to abandon your brand as soon as it’s no longer the best transaction for them because they have no preexisting relationship. They have no loyalty. They have no love for you or your company or your product. It’s merely, “What are you doing for me right now because I’m giving you dollars?”

No one is cheering for your success. That’s so frustrating. How do you build a community? How do you build a social following? How do you attract an audience if no one’s cheering for your success? These folks are somewhere between ambivalent and sometimes antagonistic.

I’m sure you can think of brands. A lot of times people complain about this when it comes to utilities. Think of your relationship with your cable television provider or with an airline with whom you’ve been very disappointed. These kinds of classic transactional models apply. There’s no brand loyalty. Occasionally, when there is, it’s so special, so unique, so rare and weird, that we talk about it and blog about it and tweet about it and share it. Perhaps the worst part is there’s no long-term magnification.

One of the things that I always talk about, that Moz always talks about, and that we’ve had a lot of success in investing in channels of all kinds is that because there is a long-term focus, because there’s a relationship that’s being built, we are essentially biasing to get long-term returns over short-term returns. That means, over the long term, more and more people magnifying, amplifying, saying nice things, helping us out when they don’t need to because they have that connection with the brand.

If you’re missing that, the flywheel that you should be building with things like SEO, with things like social media marketing, with things like content marketing encounters too much friction, and it actually becomes a transactional model, just like paid advertising, and you lose a ton of the benefit that you would normally get from inbound channels. So don’t do it.

Instead of doing this, I would urge you to seek common ground with every kind of relationship that you build and seek common ground apart from purely the relationship, although business and professional topics are certainly great places to start with those. If you can find the things that you have in common — these two for these guys — among any of these kinds of partners that you’re interacting with and any type of outreach that you’re doing, any type of relationship that you encounter, it’s going to remove the purely transactional from the model.

The thing is it has to be authentic. You can’t do this in such a way that you’re sort of going down a checklist of, “Oh, yeah, hi Fred. It’s nice to meet you. Are you also a Seahawks fan, because I am a fan of this football team?” It’s insanity. It’s obvious.

Authentically seeking out relationships as you’re going relationship building, rather than biasing and prioritizing the transactional model, can be felt in every interaction that you have. Go out of your way to help. Go out of your way to help, and do it before you’re asked to do it.

One of the things that I love to do is when I encounter someone who impresses me, a product that impresses me, a company that impresses me, I like to share it. Because I have a reasonably nice social following, that actually turns into a lot of amplification, and those people are often very appreciative. But when someone shares something of mine, even if they have five followers on Twitter, no presence on Facebook, they pinned something on Pinterest, and they have four followers on their Pinterest board, it doesn’t matter. Especially if they’re doing it before there’s any kind of interaction or before there’s any kind of ask from me, it shows me that they truly care and they value something of mine, and that feels good. That’s a great way to start a relationship.

Don’t negotiate hard to get every last penny. I think that one of the things that we’re trained to do again as marketers is, in these kinds of marketing opportunities, we go out and we see, “Well, what’s the maximum that I can possibly get? I’m going to push this other person up against the wall until they’re getting minimum return and I’m getting maximum return.”

This is actually a terrible way to build a relationship. Of course, it results in this feature where people abandon the brand as soon as you’re not providing the best service to them or as soon as you’re not the best transactional option for them.

So if you can follow these things and go and change the way you do outreach, the way you do social media marketing, the way you do business development, the way you do advertising placements, the way you do pitches, generally speaking, I think you’re going to see a much greater return.

All right, everyone. Hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We’ll see you again next time. Take care.