Five Moves That Prove You’re An Old Fart Marketer

I called someone an Old Fart (using my inside voice) the other day. He had just driven into my car and I could probably have used a stronger word but I left the thought at that.

The teeth-grinding process of putting in the claim and listening to on-hold music gave me plenty of time to consider the concept of Old Farts and how you know when you’ve met one. If we’re driving, they are the ones cruising along in the middle lane at 10 under the limit, or signalling a lane change half an hour prior to actually executing it, or helpfully waving everyone through at stop signs and messing up the right-of-way gestalt. Sometimes they are not paying attention and driving into other vehicles, though there are plenty of people doing that who are not Old Farts.

For clarity: you don’t need to be old to be an Old Fart: it’s a behaviour, not a persona.

In marketing, I think there is a lot of Old Fartiness going on, and we need look no further than these things.

Counting Leads (and only leads)

A long time ago, before sales force automation, about the best we could do for measuring the ROI on anything specific was to count up the leads. Then we got to fight with the Sales Squirrels for a bit about what constituted a lead versus a contact versus a prospect and then we did it again with the next campaign. Now we can measure lots more than that without hurting ourselves, and we should. If you are not also measuring opportunities, revenue, share of wallet, share of market, impressions, retention and recall or awareness, you are not really measuring ROI and that makes you an Old Fart Marketer.

Messing up Video

In two years, 80 percent of global online consumption will be in the form of videos. If you are surprised, you’re definitely an Old Fart, but if you’re merely alarmed you could still be in Old Fart territory if you are not doing video right. First, let’s stop ignoring it. Whether you like it or not, video is how we communicate now with customers, prospects and employees. It’s not always pretty, but it’s a fact. So if you have been quietly hoping video would go away or become magically cheaper (good video is still pricey), then you are an Old Fart.

Why do we keep making videos that are 15, 30 or 60 seconds long? Unless you’re buying time on commercial TV, those are completely arbitrary lengths of time that hail from the age of analogue broadcasting. Old Fart Marketers are then taking these analogue-length videos and grabbing the first five seconds for a pre-roll. If you are surprised at how few people actually stick around with your video once the “Skip Ad” button appears, then you are an Old Fart. We’ll deal with the perils of pre-roll next week. Even if you are producing broadcast video, why on earth are you just spewing the same content into your digital platforms?

Having a Website Navigation

Being able to find their way around your website, of course, is important to customers, but I swear I had a conversation the other day with a well-known brand that was still mapping a buyer journey from the homepage to the shopping cart. Now that is well and good, except it’s Old Fart thinking that all customers come to the “home” page and go from there. All pages on a website are landing pages (even the expired ones with old products), and have been for some time. The route then to a purchase, a download or a conversation, is less about defining a trail of breadcrumbs to follow than it is about putting up sign posts as customers go, to help them make their way to a destination of their choosing, not yours.

Ignoring micro conversions

A related Old Fart move is not doing something with the micro-conversions on your channels. Every time someone follows your brand on Twitter or Instagram, every time they share your content, each time they download something, enter a contest, answer a survey or put something in a shopping cart, that’s a micro-conversion. We’ll talk next week about why we don’t want to go overboard on these, but we don’t want to ignore them either. Old Farts don’t thank new followers or acknowledge a retweet or share. Old Farts don’t follow up downloads with a thank you or an offer for related content. Old Farts forget to gently remind people about half-completed forms and stuff in a shopping cart. Don’t be an Old Fart.

Oh, right, mobile

Consider this: every month there are more than 100 billion (with a B) unique searches, and more than half of them are done on a mobile device. Eighty percent of time spent on social platforms is done on a mobile device. And 71 percent of marketers say that mobile is key to their business. And yet, our Old Fart thinking has us optimizing snippet text for mobile less than half of the time, while 61% of users say they won’t return to a lousy mobile site and 40% will go to a competitor instead. If you are thinking your customers will brush aside a terrible experience with your brand on their mobile phones, you are an Old Fart.

There are probably lots of other symptoms of Old Fartiness, but let’s leave it here, and remember that it’s not a function of age but of attitude.

Next week we’ll look at what happens when some Young Farts get their hands on the brand.

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BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com