What is the the difference between good marketing and bad marketing?

I often hear an argument which goes like: “X doesn’t work for us”. That X can then be replaced by Facebook marketing, SEO, customer experience videos, social selling, cold calling, email marketing or whatever.

At the same time, from the same starting point, another company is banging on the same target group with the very same method to produce great results.

Actually, the statement should be in the style of: “We can’t do X well enough to great results.”

Sometimes Gary Vaynerchuk casts a great parable on this:

What is the ROI of Basketball if you haven’t trained at all?

What is the ROI of Basketball if you are Kobe Bryant?

… Everyone knows the answer.

The same logic applies to marketing and sales and to business in general. Typically, companies say that something doesn’t work for us when they have little experience doing it.

What Is Bad Marketing?

Let’s say you try Facebook advertising for the first time, spend 2 hours and 500 €.

It did not work. The end result: “Our customers are not on Facebook.”

This is a prime example of bad marketing: Doing one ad campaign trial and calling it a day.

It’s the same as when a 6-year-old would come out after training and say, “It’s not worth playing football when I can never score.”

Because of this, we at Trustmary have a Customer Success team that educates and assists in the implementation and utilization of the services we provide. Our goal is not just to help customers do things with us, but to do them so well that they provide sales.

Because you might not believe it, let’s go trough a simple example.

Concrete example of good and bad execution in marketing

Before going into the example itself, it is good to note that this is just an example and does not cover all possible variables in marketing. However, this demonstrates, especially in the context of Facebook Paid Advertising, how much difference you can make with absolute basics.

Exactly the same differences occur in search engine optimization, sales, email marketing, display advertising and so on.

I try to describe all relevant variables as precisely as possible so that it is clear to everyone what can be generalized and what not.

Example execution

1. Facebook paid advertising campaign

At campaign level conversion objective

2. Two ad sets:

Daily budget 10€
Schedule 11.4. afternoon – 12.4. morning (8.55)
Targeting:
- Finland
- 25-64v
- All genders
- ”Business” -interest
- Placement: all devices, only Facebook feed

Only difference optimization:
- First one with “impressions”
- Second one with “link clicks”

3. Completely identical ads in both ad sets (same post id, thus also social proof completely identical)

Both are driven to same landing page

Thus, as a general description of the implementation, that we target a specific guide to the general public and try to generate leads with two different goals.

The example still leaves open variables such as what would happen if you were to target with a hyper specific targeting, with impression optimisation, since both now have broad targeting. So it can be argued that the click target will find the right target audience and the impression target will completely miss, but that the impression goal optimization could work with specific audiences.

This argument is, of course, a fully valid argument. Of course I can say from my own experience that it is far more effective to target to general audience with a conversion optimisation than to a specific audience with impression optimisation, but you can try it for yourself if you don’t believe it. (Obviously there is specific cases it works vice versa.)

Example results

Above screenshot, here a summary:

Money spend: click optimisation 7,60€ – impression optimisation 7,27€
Leads: click optimisation 4 – impression optimisation 0
Lead price: click optimisation 1,90€ per lead
Impressions: click optimisation 875 – impression optimisation 3796
CPM: click optimisation 8,69€ – impression optimisation 1,92€
Link clicks: click optimisation 21 – impression optimisation 2
Link CTR: click optimisation 2,37% – impression optimisation 0,05%

What conclusions can we draw from these results?

Click optimisation brings more clicks than an impression optimisation. And at least in this case, clicks have a stronger correlation with guide downloads than impressions.

With a completely identical implementation, changing just one thing (optimization goal), Facebook can make a huge difference in advertising. The differences may not be 10-20%, but the differences can be a hundredfold, for example, in terms of the number of leads or website visits.

It should be noted that, on this scale, the differences do not yet seem as radical as they would have been if $ 100 were spent on both ad sets. But even if you don’t believe go try it for yourself.

The essential point that I hope will be drilled home from this example is that if something doesn’t work for you straight, it doesn’t mean the whole platform is bad. Especially if the one doing the campaign does not have much experience in implementing similar campaigns.

Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Here’s a short list of things to avoid when mapping out your marketing campaigns.

Not doing market research
Not defining your marketing message
Doing one ad campaign and calling it a day
Using only one channel (for example, influencer marketing, print ad, …) Use multiple channels!
Offending a certain group with bad taste humor

There are multiple exampled of fails of all time, including the infamour Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad.

If such a mistake were to happen to you, the important thing is to react to the negative backlash immediately. You can console yourself with the fact that your possible marketing mistakes will never get as much attention as that did.

In summary

Knowledge matters.

Generating good content is useless if it is not properly utilized.

We have our own customer success team to solve this problem for our client. We want to be a partner that does not just sell a quick fix that doesn’t work in the long term, but a partner that helps drill the results home even in the long term. To get to know our product and team, check out the free Trustmary Solo here!

What is the the difference between good marketing and bad marketing?