Chasing the Vanity Dragon

In a comment to my last Tuesday 2 cents (on LinkedIn), my chum Keith Smith very kindly suggested that it was “one of your best articles yet”, which is lovely, but now there is a bar to meet and it’s Tuesday and I have to do it again.

And I was thinking this is a classic B2B marketing challenge that when an organization sees something pop on the socials, the CEO says, “Well, that went well, now do it again”.

It is at this point that you can end up chasing the vanity dragon.

In the belief that the arbiter of going wellness, at least as far as this executive is concerned, was the impressions, likes, hits, opens (etc) and you now need to figure out how to lean into whatever got this marketing activity that attention and do more of that, as my chum Cathy McKnight says “add more cowbell”.

Which sounds like a plan, but of course, it has its downsides.

Firstly, a drive to be popular in your category may be at odds with your goal to be distinct.

To be distinct requires you to have an edge, an edge that is not for everyone. Is this content a clarion call for our tribe, or just a general update for the masses that they could have got from anywhere else?

Broadening your appeal for the next sugar rush hit on the bong from the vanity dragon could be bad for your brand health.

Secondly, these prolific likers, clickers, sharers and downloaders, may not be your people, from your ICP, or to be blunt, have any value to your business.

I once ran a “successful” campaign using an expensive Forrester report, it was hugely popular in the category, but the shit load of gmail addresses it yielded and lack of traction with the audience it created after they’d got their hands on the good stuff, suggested that the impact, aside from the sugar rush of awareness was not going to be felt with a proportionate bump in growth in pipeline and revenue.

Let’s face it, these folks were only interested in getting this report for free, not actually engaging with us and paying to have the problem being discussed solved.

The sugar rush spiked the metrics, but should we have done it again?

Could we have reached “our people” with something more targeted?

Almost certainly.

Chasing the vanity dragon can also lead to unintended consequences.

In one client engagement, I took a look at the performance of the PPC programs. The team was immensely proud of the incredible growth they showed year on year in metrics like hits, sessions, and other vanity things, and the boss was impressed, signing off more budget to do it again.

But something didn’t add up, when you looked at inbound performance, and as I scratched through the shiny surface of this performance (not a popular move) I discovered that the majority of traffic was coming from the countries that this company did not sell into, had no plans to sell into, had no revenue from, or had a lead convert - but yes, they were big in Indonesia and the Philippines, where paid traffic is cheap.

There was none of that Wannamaker wondering which half of the advertising wasn’t working; it was right fucking there.

However, grinding away, working the expensive traffic that was in the markets the company sold into, would not have fed the vanity dragon.

Getting additional budget could be tougher if the budget holder is focused on the wrong things; you would need to justify small incremental changes, just doing the grind, or the fact that these days, this shit is just getting more expensive to get the same outcome.

It’s a daft example, as it’s so easy to diagnose, but chasing the vanity dragon to deliver on a metric of awareness led them to, shall we say, overlook the other main job of marketing, to deliver revenue.

(As you know, I bang on about marketing’s job to create ART, Awareness, Revenue, and Trust)

So, I think what I am saying here is yes, let’s do it again, but let’s be clear what the “it” we are trying to repeat is.

Are we chasing the vanity dragon, or did it deliver awareness, revenue, or trust with the right folks?