Three Marketing Hopes for 2017

Here’s the thing. I don’t do predictions. The last time I made a prediction, I lost £20 down the bookies after my confident proclamation that Michael Owen would score the winning goal in an England game at a European Championships.

He lasted 36 seconds before being stretchered off.

But if I don’t do predictions, what’s the point of this post? I’m glad you asked. This post is what I hope happens with marketing in the coming 12 months.

My Three Marketing Hopes for 2017

1: People Stop Being Conned by False Economy

Last year I worked on a fair few projects that involved a third party. Usually a designer.

On one of those projects, the client paid for a UK-based design agency with a strong portfolio. And they paid more than they expected.

I didn’t always agree with the designer’s ideas. He didn’t always agree with mine. The end result was something better than either of our original, separate ideas would have generated.

The website we worked on delivered a return on the design and copywriting investment within a few weeks of the client’s original launch date. It’s still generating profits now.

I had another client. They paid a pittance to a company in India.

Then they paid a pittance to a second company in India because the first design was so bad.

The designer didn’t like the work I’d done. They said it didn’t make sense. They didn’t understand why a page needed more than a header and 50 words. Because the template they found only had space for a header and 50 words, and they didn’t know how to make the page longer.

I can’t tell you whether that project’s made a return on the tiny design investment. But I doubt it.

The site’s now three months overdue.

I’ve written before about cheap marketing being a trap. I hope more businesses learn that before wasting their time and their money.

2: We Stop Promoting a One-Size-Fits-All Marketing Solution

SEO is dead.

No, direct marketing is dead.

No, wrong. TV is dead.

I think you mean radio is dead.

Hah! It’s social marketing that’s dead.

Guess what?

None of this is dead.

A good marketing campaign on a platform your clients use will generate a return. But for some reason we’re in the middle of a cold war between platform evangelists.

Apparently billboard advertising has been totally overshadowed by social media (although Facebook advertises the Live service on billboards). Oh, and nobody is influenced by TV adverts any more (but companies still spent nearly £3bn pounds on Christmas TV ads). Don’t even get started on social – that’s a scam (that’s been growing for six straight years even though nobody’s that credulous).

It’s no wonder that clients are so skeptical. Entrenched evangelists are too busy pretending that we want to have social conversations about bleach, or that nobody even looks at a television any more, or that you can use SEO to build awareness of a service nobody knows exists to do the bloody research and find out which platform speaks to which person about which product.

Hopefully savvy consumers will put a stop to this.

3: We Take the Time to Look at Good Work

I went to a DMA event last year. It was great. A room full of copywriters talking about ads.

But unlike Twitter, we were examining adverts we liked.

It’s easy to throw rocks. It’s really fun to throw rocks too. Especially when you do a good line in anti-supermarket sarcasm. But it doesn’t help much.

I’m a firm believer in learning from my own mistakes. And from others’ successes.

So it’d be great if we all took the time to share great work instead of constantly pointing and laughing at missteps.

We’ll learn something, and we can always unleash the Statler and Waldorf act on the worst of the dross that really deserves it.

Over to you. What do you want to happen? And how can we make it happen?

Leave me a comment below.