Episode 15 Transcript

Welcome back to The Overthinker’s Guide to Modern Marketing, the podcast for people who remember when marketing involved knowing your customers, having something useful to sell, and telling people about it… and are now wondering why this apparently requires seventeen software subscriptions and a certification in data analytics.

I’m your host, Sean Makin, a man who has worked in and around marketing long enough to remember when a “dashboard” was something you found in a car and nobody had ever asked me to optimise the omni-channel customer journey.

Those were simpler times.

We had brochures.

We had direct mail.

We had exhibitions.

We had telephones.

Occasionally, somebody bought something.

It was surprisingly effective.

Before we begin, make yourself comfortable.

Perhaps acquire a coffee.

Nothing too complicated.

Just coffee.

Although I appreciate this is now almost impossible.

You’ll presumably need to select the origin of the bean, roasting profile, milk architecture, preferred temperature and whether you’d like your beverage to reflect your personal values.

Eventually, someone may hand you something approximately coffee-shaped.

And once you’ve successfully navigated that customer journey we can begin.

Because today we’re tackling a question I suspect many business owners and marketers have quietly asked themselves: Why has marketing become so bloody complicated?

Because somewhere along the way, marketing stopped being: Understand people. Create something valuable. Tell them about it.

And became: Develop an integrated, data-driven, AI-enabled, omnichannel demand-generation ecosystem aligned across the entire customer lifecycle.

Which is essentially the same thing but now requires a diagram.

Part 1: When Marketing Was Allowed to Be Simple

Let’s travel back in time.

Not terribly far.

We’re not going back to ancient Rome. Although I suspect even the Romans had somebody insisting they needed a stronger personal brand before launching the next aqueduct.

No.

Just far enough back to reach an era when somebody could walk into a meeting and say: “We need a marketing plan.” and nobody immediately asked which martech stack would support it.

Marketing used to involve a relatively understandable collection of activities.

Advertising.

PR.

Direct mail.

Events.

Sales materials.

Sponsorship.

And, if you were feeling particularly ambitious a promotional pen.

Promotional pens were extremely important.

Nobody knew exactly why.

But every company had several thousand of them.

They appeared at exhibitions. In meeting rooms. At conferences. In hotel bedrooms.

Nobody ever remembered receiving one, yet somehow every kitchen drawer in Britain contained at least seventeen.

I believe promotional pens reproduce when left unattended.

There is no other reasonable explanation.

But broadly speaking, marketing was understandable.

The objective was simple:

Find people who might want what you sell.

Understand what matters to them.

Explain why your product or service might help.

And make it reasonably easy for them to buy it.

That was more or less it.

Of course, marketing wasn’t necessarily better then.

Let’s not become overly nostalgic.

Measurement could be spectacularly vague.

You might spend £20,000 exhibiting at a trade show.

Someone would ask:

“How did it go?”

“Really well.”

“How many leads?”

“Loads.”

“How many became customers?”

“We’re following those up.”

“Well… the stand looked fantastic.”

And remarkably, everyone went home reasonably satisfied.

But there was something rather healthy about the limitations.

Because when you couldn’t measure absolutely everything you had to think.

You had to understand your market.

Talk to customers.

Listen to salespeople.

Observe competitors.

Use judgement.

Use experience.

And occasionally, trust your instincts.

Then the internet arrived.

Suddenly we could measure things.

Clicks.

Visits.

Conversions.

Open rates.

Behaviour.

This was extraordinary.

Marketing had entered a new age.

Finally… we would have clarity.

We did not get clarity.

We got dashboards.

Lots of dashboards.

Then came social media.

Smartphones.

Marketing automation.

CRM integration.

Personalisation.

Attribution modelling.

Customer data platforms.

And eventually… AI.

Each promised to make marketing easier.

Individually, many of them did.

Collectively, we somehow created a profession in which sending someone a useful email can involve twelve pieces of software and a meeting with IT.

And with every new technology came new terminology.

SEO. PPC. CPC. CPA. CTR. CRM. CRO. CMS. CDP. ABM. ROAS.

Marketing accumulated so many acronyms that it’s now entirely possible to say:

“We need to improve the CTR on PPC to reduce CPA while integrating CRM data into our ABM strategy.”

…and technically have spoken English.

Despite all this technological progress, the fundamental job of marketing hasn’t changed very much.

We still need to understand people.

Understand their problems.

Create something they value.

Communicate clearly.

Earn attention.

Build trust.

And eventually make it easy for someone to say: “Yes.”

Everything else is supposed to help us do those things.

Perhaps marketing started becoming complicated not when the tools arrived… but when the tools stopped supporting the strategy and slowly began becoming the strategy.

Part 2: The Tool Problem

Technology was supposed to simplify marketing.

And, to be fair, in many ways it has.

We can reach customers almost anywhere.

Track behaviour in real time.

Automate communication.

Personalise messages.

Test headlines.

Analyse campaigns.

Segment audiences.

Measure conversion.

And generate more reporting than any sane person could reasonably consume before lunch.

All of this is genuinely useful.

The problem began when we quietly confused:

Having more tools

with:

Doing better marketing.

Businesses now accumulate marketing software in much the same way garages accumulate mysterious cables.

Nobody remembers buying half of it.

Nobody knows what some of it connects to.

And yet everyone is slightly afraid to throw anything away in case it turns out to be essential.

You start with a CRM.

Reasonable.

Then an email platform.

Still reasonable.

Then analytics.

Of course.

Then social scheduling software.

Then an SEO platform.

Then a heatmapping tool.

Then a dashboard platform to display the outputs from the other platforms.

Then an automation tool to move data between them.

Then an AI tool to summarise what happened.

Then another AI tool to explain what the first AI tool meant.

Eventually, your marketing team is spending so much time managing the marketing technology…

that nobody has had time to do any marketing.

There is almost certainly a business somewhere currently paying £900 a month for software whose main function is emailing them to say they haven’t properly configured the software.

Every Monday morning: “Good news. You’re only using 18% of your available features.”

Which is presented as an opportunity.

It doesn’t feel like an opportunity.

It feels like a threat.

This is how tool complexity creeps in.

One reasonable purchase at a time.

Each platform solves a legitimate problem.

But collectively, they create a new one: Integration.

Suddenly marketing isn’t just about communicating with customers.

It’s about making sure the CRM talks to the website, the website talks to analytics, analytics talks to the dashboard, the dashboard talks to finance and everyone talks to IT because something has stopped syncing.

At this point, the customer is still waiting for a useful email.

Automation, of course, is seductive.

But automation only works well when the underlying thinking is sound.

Automate a clear process and you save time.

Automate a bad process and you simply make mistakes faster.

A poor email sent manually is annoying.

A poor email automatically sent to 48,000 people at 9:01am is scalable.

Efficiency is not the same as effectiveness.

You can produce content faster.

Send messages faster.

Launch campaigns faster.

Generate reports faster.

But none of that guarantees the work is actually better.

Good tools can transform marketing.

But tools should remain tools.

They should support strategy.

Not become strategy.

Because if your marketing plan can be summarised as: “We’re implementing HubSpot.”

That’s not a marketing plan.

That’s a software decision.

Sometimes the most advanced marketing move available is cancelling something.

One platform.

One dashboard.

One redundant workflow.

One report nobody reads.

Simplicity is not the absence of sophistication.

Sometimes it’s evidence that someone finally understood what mattered.

Part 3: The Explosion of Channels

Then we arrive at another reason marketing has become so complicated.

Channels.

There are simply too many of them.

Once upon a time, businesses had a relatively limited number of places where they could communicate with customers.

Today?

We have Google.

LinkedIn.

Instagram.

Facebook.

TikTok.

YouTube.

Podcasts.

Email.

Blogs.

Newsletters.

WhatsApp.

Webinars.

Influencers.

Streaming platforms.

Digital advertising.

Online communities.

Events.

And probably several other platforms I’m unaware of because I’m over 30 and nobody has bothered telling me about them.

Every new platform arrives with the same promise:

“This changes everything.”

Sometimes it does.

Mostly it changes the marketing plan.

Again.

Suddenly somebody asks:

“Should we be on TikTok?”

Perhaps.

“Should we have a podcast?”

Maybe.

“Should our CEO be on LinkedIn?”

Possibly.

“Should we launch a Discord community?”

Do our customers use Discord?

“I don’t know.”

Then why are we discussing this?

“Because our competitor has one.”

Ah.

There it is.

The four most expensive words in marketing: “Our competitor is doing it.”

This is how perfectly sensible businesses end up creating social media accounts they don’t understand for audiences they haven’t identified on platforms nobody in the organisation actually enjoys using.

Six months later, someone discovers the account.

The last post says:

“Exciting things coming soon!”

Dated February 2024.

Nothing came.

But the account remains.

A tiny digital monument to strategic enthusiasm.

Businesses feel they need to be everywhere.

Suddenly a marketing team of three people has the publishing responsibilities of the BBC.

Except the BBC has several thousand employees.

And presumably a better biscuit budget.

But more content doesn’t automatically mean more impact.

More channels don’t automatically mean more customers.

More activity doesn’t automatically mean better marketing.

Sometimes it just means more activity.

There should probably be a marketing metric called: Return on Exhaustion.

ROE.

Strategy isn’t simply deciding what you’re going to do.

It’s deciding what you’re not going to do.

The smarter question isn’t: “Which channels are available?”

It’s: “Where does our audience actually pay attention?”

Where do they search?

What do they read?

Who do they listen to?

Where do they ask questions?

How do they make decisions?

You don’t need to be everywhere.

You need to be relevant somewhere.

Part 4: The Metrics Have Taken Over

Now we come to measurement.

Measurement is important.

I want to make that clear before several data analysts simultaneously experience chest pains.

We should measure marketing.

The problem is that we became so good at measuring things that we started assuming everything measurable must therefore be important.

Modern marketing can measure an astonishing amount.

Impressions.

Clicks.

Views.

Reach.

Engagement.

Open rates.

Click-through rates.

Bounce rates.

Conversion rates.

Watch time.

Scroll depth.

Cost per click.

Cost per lead.

Cost per acquisition.

Return on advertising spend.

Customer lifetime value.

Share of voice.

Sentiment.

Attribution.

We can even measure precisely how far somebody scrolled down a webpage before apparently deciding they’d heard quite enough from us.

The problem?

Data is brilliant at telling us what happened.

It is considerably less reliable at telling us why.

Someone leaves your website after twelve seconds.

Why?

Was the page confusing?

Was the message irrelevant?

Was it too slow?

Was the price too high?

Did they immediately find what they needed?

Or did their cat vomit on the carpet?

Analytics cannot tell you this.

It simply records: Session duration: 12 seconds.

Which sounds much more strategic than: Emergency involving cat.

Businesses love numbers because numbers feel reassuring.

Professional.

Scientific.

Never underestimate the persuasive power of a decimal point.

“Sales are down about 12%.”

Concerning.

“Sales are down 12.37%.”

Emergency meeting.

The .37 has spoken.

Once something is measured, people start optimising it.

Clicks are measurable?

Get more clicks.

Followers are measurable?

Acquire more followers.

Traffic is measurable?

Drive more traffic.

And suddenly the organisation is pursuing numbers rather than outcomes.

There is no safer place for a mediocre marketing campaign to hide than inside a sufficiently complicated dashboard.

Give failure enough graphs and eventually it starts looking strategic.

But the purpose of data isn’t to create reports.

It’s to create better decisions.

If a metric doesn’t help you understand what’s happening, make a decision, change something or improve an outcome perhaps ask why you’re measuring it.

Measure what helps you think.

Not what merely gives you something to report.

And if your marketing report currently contains 47 KPIs…

they’re not all key.

That’s literally what the K stands for.

Part 5: Everyone Became a Specialist

Marketing has become incredibly specialised.

And that’s largely a good thing.

We have SEO specialists.

PPC specialists.

Content specialists.

CRM specialists.

Social specialists.

Brand strategists.

Data analysts.

UX specialists.

Conversion specialists.

Marketing operations specialists.

AI specialists.

All bringing genuine expertise.

But the problem comes when everyone becomes so focused on optimising their particular part that nobody is looking at the whole thing.

The SEO team wants traffic.

The PPC team wants conversions.

The social team wants engagement.

The brand team wants consistency.

Sales wants leads.

Finance wants lower costs.

The CEO wants growth.

And the customer… just wants somebody to answer their question.

Imagine running a restaurant this way.

The chef is optimising flavour.

The waiter is optimising table turnover.

Finance is reducing portion size.

Marketing is photographing the food.

Operations has introduced an app.

The data team has produced a dashboard showing a 14.7% improvement in napkin utilisation.

Meanwhile… Table Seven would quite like a fork.

That’s what happens when optimisation loses sight of experience.

Customers don’t experience your marketing departments.

They don’t experience your org chart.

They don’t know which agency runs your PPC or which team owns the CRM.

They experience you.

One business.

One brand.

One overall impression.

Marketing works as a system.

Brand.

Content.

Sales.

Service.

Customer experience.

Data.

People.

They have to connect.

Someone has to stand far enough back to ask:

Does the positioning make sense?

Are we attracting the right people?

Does the experience match the promise?

Are Sales and Marketing trying to achieve the same thing?

And ultimately… is any of this making it easier for the customer to choose us?

Part 6: The Arrival of AI

And now, naturally… we have artificial intelligence.

AI promises to simplify marketing.

Which should immediately make us slightly nervous.

Because we’ve heard this before.

AI can write.

Analyse.

Research.

Summarise.

Generate images.

Personalise communications.

Identify patterns.

Automate tasks.

And help marketers produce more content than humanity could reasonably consume if everyone stopped sleeping.

The opportunity is enormous.

So is the temptation.

Because if producing content becomes easier, the obvious response appears to be:

Produce more content.

Suddenly every business is generating seventeen articles a week explaining:

“Five Ways AI Is Transforming Our Industry.”

Written by AI.

Read by almost nobody.

Summarised by another AI.

We may be approaching the point where artificial intelligence writes content, another AI optimises it, a third distributes it and a fourth reads it.

Humans will be free to go outside.

Possibly this was the plan all along.

AI can make marketing more efficient.

But efficiency isn’t the same as effectiveness.

Producing the wrong thing faster… is not progress.

Sometimes it’s simply a more technologically advanced way of wasting Tuesday.

Part 7: Complexity Makes Us Feel Safe

Perhaps there’s another reason marketing has become complicated.

Complexity feels reassuring.

Simple strategies can feel vulnerable.

If your strategy is: “We’re going to understand these customers extremely well, create something genuinely valuable and communicate it consistently.”

Everyone understands it.

Which means everyone can question it.

But put the same idea into a 74-slide presentation containing funnels, matrices, frameworks and something labelled:

Integrated Growth Architecture

…and suddenly it feels substantial.

There is a direct relationship between uncertainty and PowerPoint.

The less certain an organisation becomes…

the more slides appear.

At approximately 120 slides, nobody remembers what the original problem was.

Which is sometimes the safest possible outcome.

Complexity also gives us somewhere to hide.

Because simple strategies require choices.

Who are we really trying to reach?

What are we going to be known for?

What are we going to stop doing?

Those questions are uncomfortable.

It’s much easier to add another workstream.

Or another channel.

Or another framework.

Preferably one containing arrows.

Lots of arrows.

Complexity can make us feel clever.

But customers don’t reward complexity.

They reward relevance.

Clarity.

Value.

Trust.

Ease.

Nobody has ever recommended a company by saying:

“You should use them. Their integrated marketing infrastructure is breathtaking.”

They say:

“They understood what we needed.”

“They made it easy.”

“They were really good.”

That’s marketing stripped back to what matters.

Part 8: Maybe Marketing Isn’t Actually That Complicated

So…

why has marketing become so complicated?

Partly because the world has become more complicated.

There are more channels.

More technology.

More data.

More competition.

More customer expectations.

More choice.

But partly…

we’ve done it to ourselves.

We’ve added tools.

Processes.

Platforms.

Dashboards.

Frameworks.

Terminology.

Layers of optimisation.

And somewhere underneath all of it…

marketing remains remarkably simple.

Understand people.

Understand the problem you’re solving.

Create something valuable.

Explain it clearly.

Make it easy to choose you.

Deliver what you promised.

Give people a reason to come back.

That’s it.

Everything else should support those things.

SEO should help people find you.

Content should help people understand you.

Brand should help people recognise and trust you.

Data should help you make better decisions.

Technology should make things easier.

AI should help you work more effectively.

The moment any of those things starts making marketing harder rather than better…

perhaps it’s worth asking why you’re doing it.

Because sophistication isn’t the same as effectiveness.

And complexity isn’t the same as strategy.

Sometimes the smartest thing a marketer can do is remove something.

One channel.

One platform.

One report.

One unnecessary meeting.

One piece of jargon.

Until eventually…

you can see the customer again.

Outro

Thank you for joining me for this episode of The Overthinker’s Guide to Modern Marketing.

Until next time…

Stay curious.

Keep questioning.

And remember:

Marketing doesn’t have to be simple because the world is simple. It needs to be simple because the world isn’t.

Customers already have enough to think about.

Our job shouldn’t be to give them another puzzle.

It should be to make the decision easier.

And if your marketing strategy currently requires a seventeen-tab spreadsheet, six dashboards and a diagram that can only be understood when printed at A1…

perhaps close a few tabs.

Carefully.

One at a time.

We don’t want to frighten anyone.

The Overthinker’s Guide to Modern Marketing is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Audible and most places where people go to think slightly more deeply while wondering whether they should probably reply to that customer email before designing another advertising campaign.