Sea of Sameness
While Outsell colleague Mike Diaz reviews marketing best practices for the CMOs in our industry promoting content-enabled SaaS and information services solutions, I keep wondering about marketing writ large and how silly some of it is. Mike’s views on AI in marketing this week cites the following headwinds:
Standing out in a “sea of sameness”
- Challenge to move beyond efficiency and drive marketing impact, quality, and brand engagement at high volume.
- Engaging with humans in real life often fails when treated as an “engineering discipline.” Buyers and buying committees often can’t be just put in a box or moved through a process.
Ensuring quality inputs (training/prompting) to ensure relevant, useful outputs
- Market insight from AI as a thought partner tends to be generic and skews toward “wisdom of the herd” without the right specific inputs and prompts.
- Need to validate learning with actual market insights and data directly from customers to inform high stakes decision-making.
- Need a human in the loop for most things due to hallucinations, blind spots and bias; also need to understand and manage legal, business, cyber and brand risks.
We won’t be turning the function over to the machines anytime soon.
In the past couple of weeks, we thankfully said goodbye to the MQL and hello to the MGB. We can’t wait until that goes mainstream. And I continue to lament the missing ‘find my’ site because over the last couple of weeks the stakes rose as we migrated from a search for a white sweater to a search for a 2024 (newish) car. Why there isn’t a way to put in one’s criteria so sellers can come to us is beyond me. We need to help buyers buy and sellers sell.
Hours went into this search. Hundreds of vehicles went through ‘the scroll.’ Four near purchases later, our vehicle is on a truck from Ohio. One has to want something pretty bad to put up with this madness. But this is what customers do every day, while marketers feed the machine with weird prompts and wonder why we hit delete with every wasted email or flee when pop-ups pollute search results and the websites we visit.
So, let’s say goodbye to anything that distracts us or uses our time needlessly and keeps buyers from buying and sellers from selling. We can start with ‘find my’ request buttons… But while we’re at it lets also do away with the following, especially in a B2B/B2professional setting:
- Continuing to market to us AFTER we buy something. We are customers. So, no need to hammer us with more dumb emails when we have actually made the purchase.
- Opting us into something we haven’t opted into. My husband needed a test requiring he wear a monitor for 24 hours. Two weeks later the monitor company sends an email saying they’ve reserved the right to send him info about products and services and if he wants to opt-out he can go to 1–800-Bla-Blah or visit URL www.dumbmove.com. He gets to do all the work to get off something he didn’t’ sign-up for, let alone in the context of a medical test! Outrageous.
- Relentlessly focusing on engagement. Unlike a fitness club, where not going might lead to cancellation, it doesn’t quite work the same way in B2B. In business time is money. “Engaging” is something a user doesn’t necessarily want to do. They want to make a decision, make a purchase, save money, mitigate risk, solve a problem and do it the quickest, best, most cost-effective way. They are NOT after engagement. If they want to learn something — great, they’ll engage. They may lean back and read a proverbial trade rag in a bygone era — sure. But engagement is a false god in B2B and we need to think about the fastest path to results instead.
Let’s keep our B2B marketing focus on solving real problems for real people. Our world would be so much simpler. We accelerate smart decisions — contact us.