Fire all your marketing staff – you don’t need them

On 09:13:06 11 May 2006 Ashley wrote:

 

OK, so that’s deliberately a bit provocative but I do wonder whether actually a lot of investment in marketing might actually be better focused on creating an outstanding proposition, product and customer service. Get that right and the internet, and your customers, will do a great job of doing the marketing for you – actually a much more (cost) effective job than you ever could.

What do most of the great internet success stories (think Google, Skype, Flickr etc.) have in common? They all famously ‘spent almost nothing on marketing’. Their product or service was just so good, or innovative, that they didn’t need to push it – their customers sold it for them. Indeed, to this day, I know lots of ‘Product Managers’ who work at Google but I haven’t yet met anyone who has marketing in their job title who represents a Google service.

If your offering and customer experience is outstanding then it’s not just the benefits of viral marketing that you’ll get. Look across all forms of online marketing and you’ll do better. Search engine optimisation – you’ll do well there because presumably people will be linking to you saying how great you are. Affiliate Marketing – you’ll do well there because your conversion rates will be higher than your competitors so affiliates will want to send their traffic your way as the earnings per click (EPC) you can deliver will be higher than they can get elsewhere.

Perhaps the only two metrics that we should obsess about are 1) Customer Experience and 2) Customer Satisfaction. All the rest (like conversion and retention metrics) would then take care of themselves. And yet, of all the metrics and KPIs I ever hear discussed, these two are rarely even on the consideration list.

Maybe this is the true secret of the mythical “Web 2.0”? Forget sales and marketing and focus all your efforts on proposition, product and service development.

Ashley Friedlein
CEO, E-consultancy.com