In online marketing, everything is good to do, and nobody wants to be left out.
That is to say, all sub-disciplines, sectors, channels, tactics, and professional organizations in online marketing and advertising compete for marketing budgets, and most claim effectiveness. Many have a good claim.
As I pointed out in the last column, we often question inexplicable marketing allocation decisions. Sometimes, we don’t give management the credit they deserve. Other times, we’re too tolerant of blatant underinvestments and overinvestments.
It’s no surprise! We’re not hard-wired to make accurate bets even in closed, easy-to-predict games of chance. And we’re not generally predisposed to invest for the long term, like say, Warren Buffett is. The key quote from Buffett is that he “never tries to make money in the stock market.” Instead, he buys into companies with real fundamentals, so he’d be OK if they “closed the stock market for five years.” When it reopened, either that company will have grown the size of its cash position and assets, or not.
Shouldn’t at least some of our marketing investments sound like that? Shouldn’t we sink our speculative monies into marketing methods that equate closely to real, predictably-performing assets? [Read the rest here]
