Startup Marketing: How Doing Less Can Actually Increase Your Brand Awareness

Here’s a Marketing Challenge for You: Make 2013 the Year You Do Less

It may sound counter-intuitive, but doing less can actually be your best bet to increase your brand awareness and improve your marketing performance.

Marketers tend to be vocal about their lack of resources, support from management, and trust from sales organizations. To be fair, B2B marketers truly do have their work cut out for them. Having to deliver their messages and offers to an increasingly fragmented media landscape, to buyers who are already more than overloaded with constant, ubiquitous advertising, and in the face of equally sophisticated and innovative competitors, B2B marketers often have to rely on more and more spending into whatever the most “hyped” marketing channels are of the moment.
It is important to stay ahead or at least catch up with the market’s development, and this means that a company will need to invest heavily into marketing campaigns and systems. This strategy does work in cases such as Marketo‘s, itself a marketing software vendor, as evidenced by their historical rapid growth rate fuelled by an extremely heavy deficit on sales and marketing spending.
However, I would argue that in marketing, more is not always better. In fact, in many cases, less is more.
This is a topic I have written about before, citing the venerable example of Apple’s early marketing strategy. Let’s dive into a more detailed look now.

Doing Less Makes Accurately Measuring Marketing Impact More Feasible

Increasing brand awareness ultimately means better marketing operations and outcomes; when outcome can be measured by market presence, brand awareness, or inbound traffic or inbound linkage. However, modern web marketing consists of an extremely complex set of tools, channels, and processes that are all interconnected. Improving marketing performance in any way requires continuous optimization across all of the aspects, media channels, and components of the marketing strategy.
Furthermore, it is already extremely hard to figure out whether what you implement actually helps improve the marketing outcomes. The biggest challenge in measuring marketing outcomes is the attribution of improvement or results to specific marketing campaigns or channels. Therefore, it is important to focus on improving one aspect at a time, lest you risk losing the impact of specific improvements in counteracting effects.
In other words, the more you’re doing, the less chance you have of figuring out what you’re actually doing right.
Another typical challenge of improving marketing performance is that companies often try to use a single message or value proposition with too broad a set of prospects, who have heterogeneous needs and therefore will react with varying levels interests to the message and offer. This further complicates any effort to derive any sort of meaningful conclusions on the improvement of marketing performance.
A concrete example is when a new landing page converts at a higher rate than average, but the converted leads yield relatively fewer “qualified” prospects.

Startup Marketing Strategy: Your Goal Should Always Be to Accomplish More While Doing Less

Another argument against purely increasing activities or the volume of marketing is that having measures based on activities, such as number of campaigns conducted, amount of content created, or landing pages created do not align the focus of the marketing improvement with the ultimate business impact of the organization. Therefore, improving marketing should not mean doing more and spending more or doing new tactics.
It is actually even worse if these new tactics, applied purely out of a desire to “do more,” actually result in some sort of improvement in brand awareness, inbound traffic, or conversions. The result can create a false sense of security that you have “figured out” marketing, when in fact you have simply stumbled upon a better process or channel, not necessarily the most optimal. It does not allow you to actually understand the true bottlenecks in the marketing funnel and the buyer’s awareness journey that need to be addressed.
In my next post I will discuss a more systematic process to define a specific action plan for testing different ways to increase your brand awareness and improve your marketing performance while doing less.