The Negative Impact of Ad Hoc Marketing

Summary

Ad hoc marketing can be detrimental to your business as it lacks a cohesive strategy tailored to your target audience and their buyer journey. A solid marketing strategy, like the Predictable Pipeline™, is essential to align sales and marketing efforts, maintain consistent branding and messaging, and drive engagement and ROI. Without a well-defined strategy, ad hoc marketing efforts can lead to confused prospects, wasted resources, and decreased effectiveness, making it crucial to invest in a data-driven marketing approach.

By Payal Parikh, Director of Client Engagement and Head of Growth at Heinz Marketing

Ad hoc marketing can not only be ineffective, it can also have a negative impact on your business. A solid marketing strategy takes into consideration your target audience, messaging that resonates with your audience, and timing. It also makes sure to meet the buyer where they are in their journey and through proper channels. Without this, your ad hoc marketing is doing more harm than good for your business.

It is not that hard to set up a bunch of LinkedIn ads and some email nurtures; it is also not hard to crank up multiple marketing campaigns if you have a big enough team. After all, who doesn’t like quick wins? And when the demand gen leadership is responsible for getting top-of-the-funnel leads, it is better to show MQLs, right?

Wrong. There are no quick wins.

We have seen companies spending a lot of money and time to get quick MQLs, but either they don’t get MQLs, or those MQLs are mostly disqualified and never end up in a good pipeline. As a result, there is still tension between sales and marketing. Sales feel marketing is giving crappy leads and marketing feels all their MQLs are unappreciated.

And how does the target audience feel? The database gets exhausted, and the target audience gets mixed and confusing messages from all directions. As a result, prospects get overwhelmed, and they go with the competition.

Why Is Marketing Strategy Important?

Some call it a growth strategy and some call it a marketing strategy. Whatever you name it, it is the foundation for your marketing and sales activities and defines the team’s course of action.

We call this foundation ‘Predictable Pipeline’.

The Predictable Pipeline™ is a data-driven strategy that targets the right buyers at each stage of the sales cycle, aligns sales and marketing efforts, and delivers measurable outcomes that directly impact business growth and success.

There are 5 pillars to this foundation for a solid marketing strategy:

• Identify and define your Target Market
• Develop messaging framework with pain points and solution messages for your target audience
• Develop a sales cycle with a buyer’s journey map
• Identify if you have the right tech stack
• Define metrics and map them to your business goals

How your marketing responds to your prospects’ needs and delivers the answers they’re looking for, is laying the foundations of your relationship and future interactions. It needs to be clear, thorough, and a seamless transition through the purchasing process.

A solid well-defined marketing strategy allows you to strengthen your brand reputation and also saves you time and money by focusing the resources only on marketing plans that support the business goals.

Here are some negative impacts when there is an absence of this foundation and when your team is doing what we call ‘ad hoc marketing’.

Inconsistent Branding and Messaging

An average customer journey involves six to eight touchpoints across various channels. This means, that maintaining a strong brand and messaging across channels is very important. An inconsistent brand message confuses your target audience, turns off potential customers, and doesn’t maintain a strong brand image.

This is the worst cost you can pay as a marketer, leading your audience to confusion and inaction.

It is important for different aspects of your marketing to reinforce each other.

Low Engagement Leads to Low ROI

Running random ad hoc campaigns means you are putting out mixed messaging in front of your audience. It also means you are bombarding your audience with these messages and confusing them. This will lead to your campaigns being ineffective and you won’t be able to see the ROI that you expected out of your marketing dollars.

In the end, ad hoc marketing will cost you a lot of wasted money and precious time.

If you think you have exhausted or frustrated your audience with ad hoc marketing, you will need a marketing strategy to get them back in your funnel.

We have helped many B2B organizations solve this problem by developing their foundation – a solid marketing strategy. Let me know if you would like us to conduct an audit and help figure out gaps in your current marketing strategy.  Reach out to us for a free 30 min consultation! payal@heinzmarketing.com