Sure signs your marketing has become too complicated

Here are signs to look out for

Sign 1. Everything needs explaining

If your marketing needs a paragraph to explain the headline, another paragraph to explain the proposition and a meeting to explain the campaign, there’s probably an issue. Good marketing doesn’t necessarily explain everything, it makes the important thing much clearer.

Organisations often try to communicate everything they possibly can because they don’t want to leave anything out. In a marketing agency you see this a lot. People want to get everything out on the table, because they think the best thing to do is communicate everything all at once – displaying absolutely everything amazing about what they offer, but realistically this overwhelms your audience.

If you put every service, feature, benefit, literally every reason to choose them, you just create a message that technically contains everything, but communicates nothing particularly well.

Your audience doesn’t necessarily need to know everything about you. They need to understand the things that matter to them.

If your marketing team can’t explain the core proposition in one or two straightforward sentences, it’s worth asking whether the proposition itself has become too complicated.

Sign 2. Every campaign starts from scratch

Do you find yourself having the same conversations every time a new campaign begins?

“What’s our message? How should we sound? What makes us different?”

If the answers change every time, it’s safe to say you probably don’t have a clear marketing strategy – just a series of disconnected campaigns.

Strong brands don’t start from scratch. They have a clear proposition, recognisable tone of voice and established brand principles to build from. That doesn’t mean every campaign should look the same. Creativity definitely still matters, but it works best when there’s something consistent to build on – as we’ve said before, consistency is key to shaping a strong brand.

If every campaign starts with a blank page, the problem may be a lack of clarity rather than a lack of creativity.

Sign 3. Nobody knows the brand proposition

This has got to be the biggest warning sign.

Ask five people in your organisation:

“What makes us different?”

If you get five completely different answers, you’ve got a problem.

Your brand proposition shouldn’t exist only in a strategy document that was written three years ago. It should be understood by the people responsible for communicating your organisation.

• Marketing
• Sales
• Leadership
• Customer service

So basically, everyone who interacts with customers contributes to how your brand is perceived.

If nobody can clearly articulate what your brand stands for, it’s almost impossible to communicate it consistently and effectively.

And, if your own people can’t explain why customers should choose you, there’s very little chance your customers will understand it either.

Sign 4. Approval takes an age

Marketing shouldn’t take weeks to get approved.

Yet many organisations have created approval processes so complicated that getting something out of the door becomes harder than creating it in the first place.

Firstly, marketing activity gets reviewed by marketing. Then sales, operations, senior management, and legal. Then someone else who wasn’t involved in the original discussion, but has an opinion anyway!

Every individual comment might seem reasonable. But collectively, the process can strip away clarity, creativity and momentum. And eventually, marketing becomes less about creating something effective and more about getting everyone to agree.

And yes, it’s an incredibly painful process, often not resulting in what you set out to achieve.

Why does marketing become so complicated?

Organisations don’t deliberately make their marketing complicated. It tends to happen gradually.

A new product, audience, service, message, channel or stakeholder gets added, and before long, everything starts to pile up. While none of these decisions are necessarily wrong, the problem comes when nobody stops to ask:

“Does all of this still make sense?”

Marketing can easily become a reflection of organisational complexity – more products, services, audiences, messages and stakeholders.

But growth doesn’t always need more complexity. Sometimes, it needs more clarity.

Complexity isn’t the same as sophistication

There’s a tendency for organisations to believe that complicated marketing looks more sophisticated.

• More messages can make a business appear more comprehensive.
• More creative concepts can make a marketing team appear more innovative.
• More channels can make a strategy appear more advanced.

But complexity isn’t necessarily sophistication.

Sometimes sophistication is knowing what to leave out, and the strongest marketing often makes difficult decisions about what ‘not’ to say.

It identifies the most important audience. The most important problem. The most important message. And focuses on those things relentlessly.

What does simpler marketing look like?

Simpler marketing doesn’t mean simplistic marketing.

It means your audience doesn’t have to work unnecessarily hard to understand you.

They should be able to answer some basic questions quickly:

• “Who are you?”
• “What do you do?”
• “Who is it for?”
• “Why should I care?”
• “Why should I choose you?”

If those answers are buried beneath layers of messaging, terminology and information, your marketing is making your audience do too much work.

And customers don’t owe you their attention.

If they don’t understand something quickly, there are plenty of other organisations competing for it.