TRUTH: The best way to ensure you are not a Marketing Jerk is to be developing vital content your audience cares about, and distributing it in complementary ways to entice them to engage with you.
The best content is the vital content your reader is looking for RIGHT NOW to solve some point of pain in their place of business.
Unfortunately, in our ‘Clicks, Likes and Shares counting’ online marketing media world, we find the pressure to achieve only one thing: Getting Our Messages To Go Viral! Because, Viral = More Business right? And, while this concept could be true for mainstream products and services, like technology advances (think Apple iphones) and men’s fragrance lines for instance, it certainly does not apply to all markets. Specifically, it doesn’t apply often to the highly technical world of industrial manufacturing or healthcare products and services for instance.
WARNING SIGNS: When a marketer asks if their next post will go viral…it’s in that very moment, a good or even great marketer can find themselves transforming into – a Marketing Jerk.
It is often difficult to tell when you are being a Marketing Jerk. I am guilty of being a Marketing Jerk. Who isn’t? I promise I’ve reformed, but for those of you wondering if you could be a Marketing Jerk, read on.
A Marketing Jerk is a person or team who continues to promote all the wrong things, never getting to the point of what the product or services benefits to the customer are or can be. The easiest way to tell if you’ve received a message from a Marketing Jerk? The content is often a lot of marketing-speak, jargon such as: “the premier provider of solutions to bring together your systems and promote financial returns on your investment“. All fluffy potatoes, but no meat or substantive content. Where’s the beef? What solution(s)? Which systems? Are they software systems or operations, sales or marketing systems? What kind or how measurable are the returns (monetary, efficiencies, equipment uptime) other clients are getting for your “solutions?” How much do your services actually cost or what is the value they provide?
Too often, it is the marketer who spams their list, whether earned or purchased, endlessly in desperation, with every service offering or product available under their roof, attempting to get a nibble or a click count to measure their effectiveness. This is especially true of the “ME TOO” companies who have competition but have not done their best to differentiate their company’s key offering(s) or Hedgehog as defined by Jim Collins in his book titled Good to Great.
The precious list of gold (suspects and prospects) you are squandering with your spam emails, touting your awesome solutions in less than awesome ways, exhausts your list members. They will soon disregard your incoming mail as irrelevant and ignore your messages (read here DELETE your messages before even reading them), unsubscribe, blacklist your email internally (this way it won’t populate their inbox at all) or blacklist you on national mail servers (IT teams love to spend their time getting your domains cleared from these – NOT!). Some disgruntled recipients even report Marketing Jerks to the FCC (this comes with a possible hefty $$$ fine PER INCIDENT).
HOW CAN YOU TELL IF YOU ARE A MARKETING JERK?
Here Are 11 Ways To Know You’ve Been a Marketing Jerk (MJ):
1. If you have ever sent anything unsolicited – repeatedly, on purpose
2. If you have spammed the holy $%*t out of a purchased or rented list with varying offers, promos and invitations
3. If you captured a subscriber through legitimate promotions and online offers, then after the initial email, sent something unrelated to the initial request (ex: whitepaper or report request followed by an unrelated topic or sales-laden communication)
4. If you sent a cold inquiry or lead, you just received to your sales team to “follow-up”
5. If you promised or over-promoted the power or usefulness of the content the subscriber would get and then under-delivered on the promise
6. If you imported a purchased list into your CRM or Marketing Automation platform that wasn’t an opt-in (didn’t request anything from you) and sent them anything
7. If you didn’t take someone who requested to unsubscribe off your spam, uh, I mean email list
8. If you thought your messaging communicated exactly the solution in clear terms to your reader but it’s really full of internal corporate terms known only to insiders
9. If you confused or hoped to confuse readers with non-committal words and expected them to believe you were the “provider of choice” just because you said so
10. If you have ever measured your marketing messaging effectiveness based on clicks (*I have never sold a click anything have you?)
11. If you have or ever think about sending marketing content and putting an ad at the beginning so you make a couple of bucks off it (I’m sure you are something worse than a Marketing Jerk but the term is probably inappropriate for our readership.)
If you are doing any of these things…You are a Marketing Jerk!
Up Next: Don’t Be a Marketing Jerk – 1.1 How do you STOP being a Marketing Jerk if you are one?
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