Why Marketing Plans Are The Biggest Lie In The Industry
I don’t like marketing plans.
Like business plans, they’re glorified guesses about what the future will hold. The problem is, no one is actually any good at guessing — including you and me!
Here are a few reasons why I think they’re the biggest lie in the industry:
- They don’t help you achieve your greatest results, they get in the way of the actual work.
- They aren’t simply about strategy, they’re a check-your-ass measure.
- They don’t add clarity, they promote blind execution.
The danger marketing plans pose is that we pick our proverbial horse and ride it without ever looking down. We choose methods based on a set of assumptions without considering the signals our results give us.
Marketing Plans, RFPs, And The Fear Of Failure
Marketing plans will box you in. And they have a twin who’s just as bad: the request for proposal.
I write about both in my new book set to publish in early 2018. Here’s an excerpt with more of my take on marketing plans and RFPs:
If you’re unfamiliar, an RFP is an open invitation for multiple vendors to submit competing proposals for a project. In theory, they’re about vetting companies to find the best fit for the project. But in practice, just like marketing plans, that’s not really what RFPs are about.
Instead, they are a self-protective layer snuggled around the decision maker’s shoulders. They offer the illusion of due diligence while granting plausible deniability. If you never go out on a limb, you can’t get fired. With RFPs, fear of failure is the motivating factor. This means it becomes another tired trope with personal safety at its core. And this will be at the expense of differentiation and results. Why? Because each of these involves risk. They involve sticking your neck out and being personally accountable for growth.
Think of it this way. If a project fails, the person who chose the vendor via the RFP process has a fall back.
“Look!” they can say. “I have seven binders packed with budgets, evaluations, and portfolios. I did my homework just like I was supposed to. It wasn’t my fault.”
A check-your-own-ass culture is the risk of any profession. Through the likes of mandated marketing plans and RFPs, marketing has fallen victim. This means we spend a lot of our lives pursuing non-failure rather than results. And there is considerable infrastructure built around this pursuit.
We go to school, take notes on the lectures, read the books, and graduate “knowing” how it’s done. Then we land our first job and quickly learn the real, unspoken goal of today’s marketplace: if you fail, ensure it never looks like your fault. So, both RFPs and marketing plans exemplify the problem with the entrenched mindset. And they reinforce an old saying in Silicon Valley: “Nobody ever got fired for picking IBM.”
IBM is big and expensive. It has a strong reputation as an enduring winner. While it’s neither cutting edge nor inexpensive, it’s proven to be an incumbent in the marketplace. So, who would ever get in trouble for picking it? It’s the safe bet, the one you’re supposed to make. Thus, we come to the crux of our problem.
Here’s an example.
Imagine it’s your job to pick winners from losers. Maybe you’re buying stocks or picking a new vendor for a project. Or better yet, let’s say your job is to run marketing that generates 1,000 qualified leads per month for your sales team.
Did a few butterflies just flutter in your stomach at the thought?
If your marketing sucks, you know the long, bony fingers of the CEO will point squarely at you. Problem is, nothing from your textbooks is working. You stare at a blank whiteboard with your job on the line. It’s 1,000 leads per month or you’re canned. So, what are you supposed to do?
Nobody gets fired for picking IBM. It’s the right choice. The safe choice. The one you’re supposed to make. This produces bureaucratic cultures rather than growth-oriented ones. Why, you ask? Because one time someone failed. So, cumbersome processes like marketing plans and RFPs cropped up to make sure no one ever fails again. But the victory is not in avoiding failure. You don’t actually have control over failure — but you do have control over how you respond to it. How you learn from it. And how you use it to catalyze growth by different methods and mediums than your competition.
The 10x Marketing Formula helps you actually get results from your content marketing. We’re not just going for incremental improvements, we’re going for 1,000% growth.
That means we want take whatever your number one goal is… website traffic… email signups… leads… or dollars in the cash register…
My goal in sharing The 10x Marketing Formula is to give a tool that will help you achieve 10x growth for any metric rather than slight improvements.
Grab chapter one for free here and be the first to know when the book launches.
