Things your marketing team hates to hear

They are probably the loudest bunch in your company. Sometimes they get under your skin, but you know that the office is just not the same without them. Yes, we are talking about the Marketing Team - the voice and face of your company.

Every company has occasional 'strife' between teams. It therefore helps to know each other’s’ pet peeves. A lot has been written about what the developers hate to hear. 

I thought, why not do one for the marketing team? 

So here are my top six things that you shouldn’t say to your marketing team:

"Let’s redesign the website”

It’s a great practice to constantly monitor your website’s performance and update it. However a lot of companies spend a tremendous amount of resources overhauling their websites - even when they don’t need to.

We look at our company website a dozen times everyday; it’s only natural to feel the urge to redesign it after a few months. However, asking your marketing team to overhaul the website just because you’re bored of it is probably not the smartest decision.

It helps to know the SaaS benchmarks. According to Totango these are the stats of a best in class B2B website:

• Sign-up / Total visits: 10%

• Paid licenses / Total visits: 1.5%

If your website is achieving these stats, it’s not in a dire need of redesign. Of course, you need to be proactive and monitor best practices. However, redesigning the website is a long process and shouldn’t be a priority if it is already performing well.

"Can you A/B test the colour of that button?”

A lot of times difference in opinions results in one standard conclusion  - Let’s A/B test it!

Source: shopify.com

On paper it makes sense. “We’ll take my way of doing things, run it in parallel with yours and then have the answer in a couple of weeks.” In reality, it doesn’t work in every situation.

Perhaps the most famous (infamous) example of A/B test is changing the colour of a CTA button. A lot of studies have proved that more often than not, this test always gives random results. If you get 5% more sign-ups with a red CTA compared to a green one, it’s most probably a random variable.

Asking your marketing team to conduct A/B tests on minor aspects of the same element will put both their and your time to waste. A/B tests should always have prominent differences between the two versions.

"But they are doing it like this”

Every competitor of yours is in a different stage of business. They also have different paths to success. Therefore telling your marketing team to do something a certain way because a competitor is doing the same will annoy them.

For example if you are a new startup that’s competing against an established giant like Airbnb, and you are asked to base all your marketing campaigns on them; it will not work. An established brand like Airbnb and an unknown entrant can’t have the same marketing strategy.

"We don’t need a sales team”

Even in this era of digital marketing, you need a sales team to sell. Although they influence each other considerably, marketing isn’t sales.

The self service model is increasingly driving growth in SaaS industries, but the traditional sales team stays as relevant as ever. According to research by Bizo and Oracle, only 20% – 60% of sales leads are generated by marketing, which means over a half of total sales leads are generated by outbound efforts. The sales team has the targets, they have the skills, and they provide the much needed push to break even.

"Can we pause marketing for a bit?”

A brand is built around momentum. It takes months to build momentum with marketing for your brand - and stopping it means losing two to three months worth of buzz.

This doesn’t mean that marketing shouldn’t be adjusted to seasonal changes. It definitely makes sense to reduce B2B marketing spend during Christmas, and increase it when companies plan their budget. However, you should be very careful about asking your marketing team to cease paid marketing in order to test a hypothesis.

General interruptions

This rule holds true for all the teams. On an average it takes a person 15 to 30 minutes to build focus, and even a simple interruption can break that flow.

A lot of marketing activities require creative thinking and high concentration. To solve this issue for everyone in the company, designate certain quiet areas in your office space where people can work if they don’t want to be disturbed.

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