Marketers often assume that consumers will watch all of their 10 second ad on YouTube or stick around for the entirety of their Instagram carousel. The reality, however, is that you’re likely to be getting far less of your audience’s attention than you might like.

We’ve all heard that it takes 7 seconds to begin forming an impression. Well, one study conducted by Mars neuroscientists found that marketers actually get about 2 seconds to start making an impression with audiences online. While there is, of course, no way of determining for certain just how long consumers are spending looking at your ad in particular, one thing is for sure: it’s probably much less time than you think – and that has some serious implications for your marketing campaigns.

The attention economy

Attention is finite. It might be focused on a single task, or distributed across multiple ones, but it’s ultimately a zero-sum game. And modern media understands this. We’re surrounded by media that is always trying to get more of our eyeballs on it more often, which in turn is further facilitated by on-demand services and the normalisation of multi-screen behaviour.

The result is that while content becomes more abundant in a bid to grab the interest of the consumer, attention becomes an increasingly scarce commodity.

To make matters even trickier for marketers, this scarcity of attention is often paired with a low commitment culture towards content consumption, where impressions and views don’t necessarily translate into consumer engagement.

Overcoming low commitment

A huge proportion of marketing materials, whether it’s content, ads or social media posts, are designed with the aim of getting as many eyes on them as possible. This, of course, isn’t a bad thing, but if a medium achieves a very low commitment, and hence low attention, gaining any true or lasting brand traction is always going to be a struggle.

So, while views and ad impressions are great, businesses and marketers need to look beyond those numbers and instead become coldly results-oriented when looking at how those views are translating into concrete outcomes. If your ad is gaining impressions, but those impressions are not turning into qualified leads and sales, it’s all for nothing.

Logic vs. emotion

Perhaps one of the most powerful ways marketers and brand can overcome the challenges of low attention and commitment is through understanding the role emotion plays in consumer decision-making.

One of the most awarded marketing campaigns in recent years is Cadbury’s campaign centred around the concept of generosity. While the concept is indirectly connected to the product, it works to engage audiences by relaying instantly relatable situations that linger in the mind long after the advert has been seen. These ads don’t bother telling us how great or delicious Cadbury chocolate is, they tell us stories.

Storytelling in this way bypasses the logical aspects of our brains, tapping straight into our emotions. When attention is at a premium, the ability to evoke emotion in an audience is key to not only triggering a fast response, but also getting that response to stick. With the average ad getting mere seconds to create a lasting impression, leveraging an emotional response may buy you the extra time you need to sustain attention and impart enough information to make that all-important sale.

Final thoughts

With audience attention increasingly divided across multiple screens or focused on other things besides being sold to, perhaps the biggest sin your ads can commit is being boring.

Your marketing efforts need to overcome the huge hurdle of being ignored, dismissed, or scrolled past unnoticed before you can even begin carving out consideration with your prospect. With so little time to achieve this, it’s essential that you test your ads with external audiences in the most natural setting possible to ensure they’re cutting through the noise of daily life and grabbing both consumer attention and commitment.

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The impact of the attention economy on marketers

As humans, we excel in fooling ourselves into thinking that we are rational choice engines. We like to believe that the things we do and the decisions we make are fundamentally based on logic and reason – but this just isn’t the case.

Nobel Laureat and cognitive scientist, Daniel Kahneman, explores in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, the model of two distinctive modes of thought characteristic of human cognition. The first is automatic, almost instinctual, and heavily based on past experiences, while the second is slow and calculating, with the conscious employment of logic and rationality.  This, along with a lifetime body of other work, proves to us all we are not in any way masters of our own decisions.

So, what does this have to do with marketing? Well, quite a bit. Understanding the central role emotion plays in decision-making can be the difference between an ad that captures attention, gets remembered and prompts action, or simply blends into the background noise of our daily lives.

Emotional decision-making

The two systems outlined in Kahneman’s book are but one eye-opening glimpse into the mechanics of human decision-making, and call into question how we like to think of ourselves. Behavioural scientists know that are brains are not like computers, they don’t weigh up the odds, calculating the best decision based on logical outcomes and reasoning, instead, they’re much more like that first mode of thought described by Kahneman – fast, instinctual and most importantly – emotional (“emptions” being a word we give to powerful instant reactions).

In fact, even deeper than this, our brains are exceptionally skilled at providing ex post facto rationale to support those emotional decisions we previously made. We aren’t even aware that this is what’s going on.

We evolved this way because this past experienced based “feelings” response is efficient. Gut instinct makes for quick decision making which, in evolutionary terms, could be the difference between life or death. Faced with a lion about to attack, there’s little point in starting a bullet-pointed discussion on the pros and cons of fleeing. Outside of wild animal attacks, which are somewhat rarer in modern life, emotion-based decision-making, which relies on patterns we are familiar with, is still efficient and takes much less cognitive effort. But remember, this isn’t a choice. Its just how the brain works.

Why emotion matters to marketers

The crux of this is that emotion really matters in marketing. Most marketers and advertisers get a fraction of a second to grab their audience, meaning we need to trigger a fast response if we can. It’s the key to capturing interest. Based on the behavioural and cognitive science of how we know our brains work, if we neglect to engage emotion to gain attention and drive our message home, it will most likely fail.

This golden rule applies to marketing in both B2C and B2B – though the specific emotions we’re dealing with might change. Research has demonstrated that adverts that elicit feelings of happiness or cuteness work better than those that don’t. Even negative emotions can work.

In B2B marketing, decisions are more likely to be underpinned by feelings like familiarity (“I know those guys”) or trust (“They are dependable”). Confidence is as much a business gut feeling as any logical calculation, and B2B marketers understand the value of tapping into this not entirely logical construct.

Often, the common denominator for both B2B and B2C marketing is humour. While it’s tricky to get right, and can be painful when done wrong, making the audience laugh (intentionally!) is a fast route to getting them to feel good about a brand. It’s a way of getting under the radar.

Memorability plays a huge role in marketing success. Science shows that it’s actually the emotion created that encodes those ads into our memory, as we remember based on how something makes us feel. The stronger the feeling, the more vivid the memory. Emotive marketing, therefore, isn’t just more powerful, it’s more memorable, too.

Marketing that is forgotten is marketing that may as well have never happened.

Making sense of emotion

While we’ve discussed emotion-based decision making as compared with logical decision-making, let’s not make the mistake of thinking there is no ‘sense’ in these emotional responses.

As consumers, we’re faced with ongoing micro-decisions regarding which brand of cereal to buy at the supermarket, or which brand of stationary to stock the office with. However, in the grand scheme of things, most of these decisions are of limited importance in our lives. We don’t want to spend hours agonising over every last detail before making such decisions, and in these instances, emotional short-cuts can be a useful time and energy saver. Often, the brand-we-know is enough to tip the decision.

Even in B2B, a genuine logical choice is actually a very hard thing to arrive at despite what we tell ourselves. It can be nearly impossible to fully compare specifications and capabilities of, say, two competing software products.  Therefore, that emotional short-cut allows us to make a decision and get on with things. And remember – the boss’ emotions (or those of our teams) can come into play here, too.

Pushing the right buttons

It may seem that asking for marketing and advertising that pushes emotional buttons is somehow risky or odd, but in fact the opposite is true, and the science backs this up. Fail to tap into our preference for emotional decision-making, and the chances of your marketing budget working hard for you is vanishingly small.

Of course, there is an implication that your marketing may feel “riskier”. A bullet point list of features and benefits feels “safe” (even if it won’t actually work). It’s important that you therefore seek objective feedback on your work rather than assume you are getting the emotions right first time. A smart way to reduce that risk.

Read more:
Marketing: It’s the emotion, stupid

There may be few certainties in life, but when it comes to the marketing world, there are several hard facts that account for why it is really, really tough to go from being a small business to a large one.

Some of these issues are simply a byproduct of how our economy works, while others have much more to do with human behavioural psychology and the mysterious way our brains sometimes operate.

Over my career, I’ve worked for some very big companies. I’ve also started my own somewhat smaller company, so I’ve experienced these marketing laws from both sides of the fence. So, what holds smaller companies back, and how can you “hack” the system if you’re a small company looking to get bigger?

The familiarity problem

The first and most fundamental barrier for small companies is the human brain. We are programmed to pay attention to the familiar, essentially priming us to only notice things that we already know about. People out shopping just don’t “see” unfamiliar brands in the same way they notice the big brands, even when right in front of them. In this way, marketing from those larger brands works much more effectively than those from more obscure brands.

I experienced this firsthand at a conference we sponsored. Our logo was plastered in front of delegates all day, but when I asked an attendee over coffee if he’d ever heard of us, I received a rather blank “no”.

So, while marketing from small brands needs to work much harder to get noticed, those large, well-known brands are constantly capturing small slices of attention every time we see them, making them more familiar still. There’s a reason people still drink Coke.

Fear of getting it wrong

Compounding the attention problem is the issue of trust. We’re emotional creatures, and there’s no emotion stronger than the fear of failure or embarrassment. When it comes to those bigger, pricier purchases – like those we see in the B2B sphere – the fear of making the wrong decision far outweighs the potential benefits being marketed to us.

The result is a tendency to buy from companies whom we consider as “proven”, and these tend to be – you guessed it – larger brands. And the code for “proven” is often “I have heard of them”. Defaulting to these (theoretically) tried-and-true brands helps to absolve us of the feeling of personal responsibility if it does go pear-shaped, after all, we bought from a brand that everyone knows can be trusted, so it’s not our fault it didn’t work out, right?

This is a key point, especially in B2B marketing, as it’s not just brands that the buyer is familiar with, but ones that their boss also knows about, providing even more reason to play it safe and making familiar brands even harder to dislodge.

Economies of scale

Larger companies don’t only have a marketing advantage over smaller ones in terms of customer psychology, they also have budget efficiency on their side. There are a thousand ways that big firms benefit from economies of scale. I recently attended an expo full of large companies. They had far more of their clients attending, enabling them to buy a bigger booth, enabling them to benefit from better placement, visibility and so on. This plays out in multiple scenarios in B2B marketing of course, but also on the consumer side, too. The big brands can buy the most visible advertising spaces and displays, and this feeds into our original issue of attention and familiarity.

Similarly, large firms benefit from manpower. Great marketing is hard work and requires extreme attention to many small details. Get any one of these wrong and it can be a devasting waste of cash. In the SME world, it’s entirely possible that there simply isn’t a dedicated marketing team with endless resources and deep pockets, making it difficult to put that detailed work into every campaign.

Double jeopardy

Finally, we come to the law of double jeopardy. This is a particularly nasty one for small businesses. It says that not only does a small company have fewer customers, but those customers are less loyal than those of larger firms.

The concept of repertoire buying dictates that bigger brands get more customers and more of the available revenue from those customers to boot. Unfair, isn’t it? This is closely linked to our first point but turned into hard numbers.

Marketing as a small company doesn’t just have to work harder to even gain traction with the average consumer, and then actually convert them into a paying customer – it also must work much harder than the bigger brands to keep them coming back.

Why small is beautiful

Given the huge obstacles that seem to be working to keep the little guy down, should smaller brands throw in the towel and give up? The answer is of course, no.

First of all, there is absolutely nothing wrong with being small. You can target a specific market or customer type and become well known to those people. You simply may not be aiming to go “big”. Niche marketing works well. Become famous to a few.

As a smaller company, you also have one big weapon on your side – creativity. You can break the rules and get attention in ways marketers of the big firms may be wary of doing. Being small gives you no excuse to be boring when it comes to your marketing. Say something different. Be surprising. And do it in a new way. Small companies are not usually run by committee, so it’s more feasible to be braver and take a little more risk on a great marketing idea. Creativity buys you attention. Whether from customers or the press, or these days, on social media.

Smaller companies are also in a great position to take their small but lovely brand and tie it up with a bigger business that gets you that reach. Big firms often use smaller ones to add value and set themselves apart – a win-win scenario.

Being smaller could in principle also get you far closer to your customer and allow you to understand them much better than a huge multinational. Find new and appealing ways to get through to them and deliver their needs better. This is a foundation skill of marketing and smaller companies are often inherently closer to their customers to pull this off.

Keep on keeping on

It may seem like the odds are stacked against you as a small company, and while they are in many ways, in many more, smaller firms are in a unique position to do things differently and make a real impact with their marketing.

As a small firm, persistence is key. Most big companies expect marketing to work fairly quickly. If you are an owner of a small business, you may be willing to spend a significant amount of time plugging away, growing step by step. Your patience can be, in the end, your point of difference.

Whatever you do, obey the golden rules: be consistent, be different and know your customer. Someone has to be tomorrow’s big firm, right?

Read more:
They say size doesn’t matter. They’re lying

Good marketing has the power to transform a brand’s image and reputation, yet so many companies are losing out from ideas and campaigns that underperform. Ho hum work that fails to connect with audiences and draw them in. Work that burns budget to little end result.

It’s easy to write this off as ads simply not being as good today as they used to be, or the “sameness” of digital stuff, but the problem runs deeper.

Effective marketing has to be brave marketing. Marketers must be willing to take uncomfortable creative leaps – leaps that contain risk – which in turn requires them to be courageous enough truly do something different. Particularly when the results can’t be proven ahead of time.

Put simply, boring risk averse marketing won’t get attention. And it won’t persuade anyone to change what they do.

Being brave in a difficult market

The uncomfortable truth about marketing is that in too many firms it’s seen as a nice-to-have, but expendable during tough periods. Today’s uncertain environment is therefore particularly anti risk taking and a barrier to pushing creative boundaries. Rather companies may stick to “safer” campaigns that already have easy buy-in from leadership. Even if the results are less than stellar.

With marketers traditionally undervalued by many businesses, it takes an immense amount of bravery to push a bold or innovative campaign on your own, championing it to get buy-in from above. Even more so with job security hanging in the balance. The result is an echo chamber of the same old ideas, and campaigns that fail to do anything new or worse, simply disappear into the background of customers’ busy lives.

Risk vs. reward

Marketing is a delicate balance of risk and reward, with the biggest chance of a good payoff also posing some of the greatest risk to both budget and, worse, reputation. This means, too often, brands and their marketers stick to “safer” ideas.

I am not advocating engaging with controversy for controversy sake or leaping blindly into a campaign without due diligence. But for business managers it does mean accepting that marketing is complex and reward requires risk taking. Alongside this, an over-reliance on data or market research can only take you so far before you need to step outside your comfort zone and take the plunge with a new idea. One that’s hard to fully prove ahead of time.

Take the Guinness Surfer ad, which aired in 1999 and was voted among the UK’s most popular ads of the time. The agency behind it, AMV BBDO, found the ad earned a lukewarm response during the market research phase, and for sure management were nervous, but they stuck with it because they had confidence in bringing the idea to fruition. It broke many rules of advertising, and the category. But became a turning point for the brand.

And you don’t have to spend the budget Guinness does to face a similar challenge of using a creative idea to drive change.

Challenges of feedback

No marketer wants their great idea to become weakened through a redesign by committee, but knowing when and how to seek outside perspective also takes a certain amount of courage. And think of this: a decent set of objective feedback can be more power to your elbow in persuading others (or being confident enough to press “go”).

It’s worth also remembering when considering creative assessment that while marketers are passionate about what they do, working so closely on campaigns can leave us unable to see our work through an external fresh eyed lens, limiting the ability to see work as it truly is, or escape our own confirmation bias.

Soliciting feedback and the perspectives of peers in and around the marketing sphere is useful for this (and hence mitigating the risks of breaking out of your tramlines). But it comes with a fear of criticism. It just doesn’t always feel good to have one of your ideas judged by others.

Given the need for greater creativity and risk taking to drive better results, perhaps being “brave” around feedback is a necessary balance. To feel yourself being prudent whilst still recommending a strong idea. Balancing one form of courage to support a bigger one.

Final thoughts

If you are in charge of marketing, courage has to be part of your professional make up. Same goes for owners and founders. You can’t risk being bland or uninspiring. That kind of marketing fails (so you lose in the long term). Nor can you rely on numbers or science to tell you the answers. Taking an appropriate risk balanced with feedback to help you win support around you is definitely the way to go.

Read more:
Putting on a brave face: Why marketers have to be inherently more courageous than most in business

Let’s face it – receiving feedback can be uncomfortable.

Even the most well-meaning and gently delivered constructive criticism can feel like a complete shock to the system, and most people do not take feedback as well as they’d perhaps like. This can be problematic enough when it comes to employee experience of performance reviews, but when it’s your own business you’re receiving feedback on, it can feel much more personal. And far more emotive.

This is an unfortunate reality, as feedback – even difficult to swallow feedback – is key to improving our ideas and ultimately, our business.

The fear of feedback

The reason for fearing feedback is rather simple – it just doesn’t feel good to be criticised.

Our brains are hardwired to perceive feedback as inherently threatening. This might be because it’s a blow to our egos, has the potential to undermine others’ perceptions of us, or is simply a bit embarrassing. Especially as a business owner, it can be incredibly difficult to hear the idea that you’ve worked hard on and become personally invested in is, well, bad.

Given how uncomfortable feedback can be to hear and act upon, the natural response to perceived criticism is often less-than-ideal. In many ways, these responses align with what’s known as the stages of grief. Denial, for example, is one of the most common, albeit unconscious, responses, where it is much easier to simply ignore or dismiss feedback than face an uncomfortable reality. How easy is it to say to ourselves “they don’t know what they’re taking about”.

Similarly, a recipient may respond with a feeling of helpless dejection, brooding and ruminating over negative feedback, whilst sadly doing little to address the problem. Or perhaps they will procrastinate, where it becomes easier to put off and delay the issues making us feel uncomfortable rather than face them head-on with action and course-correction.

Accountability as a business owner

Despite the innate discomfort that feedback evokes in us, perhaps one of the biggest shifts in receiving feedback as a business owner (compared to being an employee) is the dramatic change in accountability, and its impact on the bottom line.

As a business owner, it’s natural to become personally invested in your ideas. In fact, this is something to be encouraged, as that personal investment is often the driving force behind taking your business to bigger and better heights. However, despite your personal engagement, the distinction between a good or bad idea could now be the difference between making or losing money. It really matters.

While feedback can still feel like a slap in the face, that feedback is a necessary function of ensuring your money is being funnelled into the best possible ideas that translate directly into your profit and cash. Feedback then, should be welcomed and treated as objectively as you can.

The challenges of soliciting feedback

Many of the difficulties in receiving feedback are also present in giving it. It can be just as uncomfortable giving constructive criticism as it can be taking it. People are wary of getting it wrong and that hinders the quality of their input.

The issue for a lot of business owners, especially owners of smaller businesses, is where can you find the kind of valuable feedback you need to prevent yourself pouring time and resources into a terrible idea?

While asking for feedback from within your organisation is valuable – and certainly one good way for bosses to remain accountable to employees and foster an environment of open communication – the inherent power imbalance present in this dynamic often makes it difficult to obtain candid feedback. Confidentiality helps. But is it really trusted?

Compounding this, people are fundamentally social creatures. We thrive on building positive relationships with each other, both personal and professional, and don’t want to be perceived as being mean or unkind when we do deliver feedback.

This isn’t simply because employees don’t want to upset their boss – though this may indeed play a role – it’s because employees can be just as unconsciously biased as the owner of the business. It can be incredibly difficult to gain objective perspective on your own day-to-day work, and this is no different for employees, who will often experience a confirmation bias when it comes to the activities and ideas they have a role in. This is why opening yourself to external perspectives and the feedback they can provide is so crucial.

External feedback, then, is vital. But be wary about this too. Consultants can be great but in the end they want to stay in the relationship and sell you more work. That may hinder true honesty.

Coaches and mentors are meant to be objective, but they too need to stay in a good relationship and that might make them wary about too much honesty. If you have such a person (and it’s a great idea to get one), when was the last time they told you something that made you feel genuinely uncomfortable. They should. But do they?

Peer group share sessions can be very powerful, as attendees are not beholden to one another. In theory. But we still must listen carefully to hear behind normal good manners and unwillingness to upset each other. You may have to ask pointed questions, often prefacing them with some variation of “please don’t worry about upsetting me, I need to know what you really think”.

Final thoughts

The ability to solicit and positively act upon valuable feedback isn’t just good for you as an individual, it’s good for your business. Doing it has profit-driven benefits.

As hard as it may be, overcoming those natural but unhelpful responses to feedback or perceived criticism allows you to improve your decisions, improving both performance and results.

Ultimately, when it’s your own money and the success of your business on the line, there is no room to be precious about feedback. Seek it out.  Take it on the chin. Use it to your advantage.

Read more:
Everyone says they want feedback on their ideas – but this isn’t entirely true. Even for the business critical issues

Take a cursory glance online and you’ll be inundated with assertions that marketers need to move faster, be more agile and respond to technological changes at breakneck speed. If you don’t, you’ll fail to keep up with shifting demands of the market and your competitors. The pressure is on!

Feeding into this mania for speed are ad platforms like Google and Meta, who, while offering a cost-effective way for businesses of all sizes to market themselves, also encourage a quantity over quality approach to advertising. They make it easy to spend money with them. Quickly. For obvious reasons.

My question today is whether in this frenzy, are we missing something fundamentally important? Does all this push for speed leave our business’ less effective as a result?

Perhaps we marketers today can learn a trick or two from the Slow Food revolution, a movement founded in rural Northern Italy as a response to overproduction and the poor nutritional quality of fast-food chains. A movement challenging quantity with a manifesto for quality. We are what we eat, they advocate.

Value over volume in marketing

The slow food philosophy values food prepared with care and consideration that fosters a sense of deep appreciation in diners. It sees that the food itself is truly significant and that time invested in the best ingredients, the most careful preparation and the time taken to enjoy all combine to create a wholly “better” experience. To some extent this is going back to the way food would have been in the old days. Simple. Authentic.

In a somewhat analogous way, if we look back at “old school” marketing, when execution was  only by “slow media” e.g. TV ads that took months to prepare and played for long period, or Magazines where you had weeks before the deadline, and the publications hung around for weeks,  or even Direct Mail (remember that?), the marketing process could invest considerable time and attention into getting that marketing wholly “right”. Including plenty of market research and testing.

There wasn’t a second chance. You bet once. So you had to bet right.

Now, all that’s needed is a subscription to Canva and enough budget to run your campaign on Google Ads. And off you go.

Erosion of trust in online advertising

We’re inundated on a daily basis by dozens, if not hundreds, of low-quality banner ads and sponsored social media posts, and for the most part, consumers have learnt to simply tune them out, scroll past without so much as a second glance, or in particularly egregious cases, block an advertiser from their feed altogether. It’s getting harder to get the response we want and need.

Audiences are growing increasingly irritated by online advertisers, with 9 in 10 believing ads are becoming more intrusive, and ruining their online experience.

It gets worse, however. One YouGov survey found that just 1 in 10 Brits trust social media advertising – a mere 10% compared with the 54% that rated TV advertising as trustworthy.

Clearly, marketers need to restore consumer trust in our work through high-quality, relevant ads that prompt viewers to take further action, rather than simply bolstering metrics that don’t translate into meaningful brand interactions and ultimately, sales. One could say this is akin to fast food outlets where more and more people today question the nutritional value and quality of the food they buy.

Ads are not a zero sum game

For one thing, churning out vast quantities of poorly realised ad creatives can and will have a negative impact on your overall brand perception and reputation.

Yes, maybe one outcome is you just get ignored. The downside is just wasted budget. Bad enough in its own right, but there is the real risk that dull ads harm your brand perceptions.  Once you are “labelled” cheap and nasty it’s very hard to recover. Even more so in B2B.

Perhaps your customers will remember duff ads and hold them against you (even if without much thought).

And by the way, A/B testing may not help much if you test two poor options against each other!

Is it time for more Slow Marketing?

While we certainly have the ability to do rapid marketing, it would be wiser to take a page from the Slow Food book. Just because we can do something fast, doesn’t necessarily mean we should. Marketing is our connection to our customers, a precious link from our minds to theirs. Not something that should be treated lightly.

I know the immediate sugar rush of high click-through rates are seductive but all too often we can’t easily measure the attitudes and lasting emotion we create. Whether we win long term customers.  Many of our clicks could fail to bring any real motivation or interest with them. Which then detracts from the potential to recruit a genuine customer. Or build a better brand reputation and image. Which is the long-term life blood of our business (in our analogy the superb, memorable meal).

Starting the Slow Marketing movement

Whilst I’d love to discuss this with you in a restaurant in rural Piedmont with lunch of fresh truffle infused local pasta, I’ll just say now that creating campaigns that engage and delight rather than irritate or bore customers requires taking the same approach to ads that slow food proponents take to their dishes. Marketers must stop the overproduction of low-quality ads that are flung out by algorithm to “the more the merrier” mass audiences, and instead take the time to craft visuals with charm and intelligence – thoughtful messaging that  truly resonates with their target audience.

Or perhaps your competitors will?

Read more:
Not so fast! What marketers can learn from the Slow Food movement

A recent report from CB Insights indicated that 14% of new businesses fail due to poor marketing. With SMEs in the UK poised to spend a staggering £35.1 billion on marketing this year alone, many will end up throwing good money after bad with marketing initiatives that fail to deliver a clear return on investment.

So, what is going wrong?

The problem is that many marketers are staying ‘in their own head’ and don’t understand that successful strategies leverage an ‘outside-in’ approach.

This means talking to others from outside your ‘bubble’ and getting their unbiased opinion on what’s working and what isn’t.

Here are some reasons why a peer-to-peer perspective could be what’s lacking in your marketing strategy, and why gaining outside feedback could be the key to thinking more and spending less.

New ideas

A PwC survey conducted on 1,200 business executives found only one-quarter of companies saw themselves as leaders in innovation, which is worrying, as innovation is a crucial part of brand growth strategy.

Sometimes, all it takes is speaking to others and learning about what they have been doing to inspire innovation and new thinking for your own campaigns.

This isn’t about ‘copying’ or mimicking the work of others. It’s an opportunity to learn about what has worked well [and not so well] and new approaches you could take to get the most back from your unique audience.

An outsider’s perspective can have a huge impact and prompt you to look at problems and opportunities from a different angle, generating new ideas that you may not have thought of otherwise.

Reimagining existing ideas

Beyond being a source of new ideas, outsiders can also help vet and reimagine the ideas you already have.

Once you have an idea on the table, bringing it to others outside your field can be a godsend.

Firstly, they can provide a neutral opinion on how new the idea really seems and whether it actually is innovative.

Secondly, they can suggest ways you could adapt your marketing that are common outside your industry but that may never have occurred to you.

Reduced costs

The average marketing budget accounts for nearly 12% of a company’s overall budget and 10.4% of its revenue, according to the 2022 CMO Survey. Therefore, every pound spent needs to work hard for your business.

As a small business, you can’t always afford to experiment with new and potentially risky ideas, and with so many campaigns failing to deliver real value, this crucial investment is often plagued with risk.

But, by getting the opinion of someone externally, you can identify ways to improve and streamline your ideas, and cut costs in the process.

Getting into the mind of the consumer or customer

Outsiders can look at your approach from the consumer or customer’s perspective.

This can help you understand whether you’re clearly explaining the idea to someone who doesn’t live and breathe your internal lingo.

While the benefits of your new product or service may seem obvious to you, your campaign might not resonate with your external audience. While enthusiasm for what your business does is key, when it comes to marketing, that enthusiasm can work against you by clouding your judgement, and leaving you with campaigns that are not as effective as they otherwise could be. Simply, it comes down to the fact that you can’t read the label from inside the jar.

Therefore, speaking to someone on the outside could be key to whether your marketing does its job well or not.

Final thoughts

The benefits of an outside perspective on your marketing are clear, but one of the most difficult things to do as a business owner is to view your business from an external point of view – like an outsider looking in.

By seeking opinions on your campaigns from someone who isn’t within your business, you can see how your ideas are viewed though a different, unbiased lens, and ultimately take your strategy to a whole new level.

Read more:
Don’t trust your gut: The importance of peer-to-peer perspective in marketing