If you want to see an example of how The Industry employs Mediocre Marketing to take shortcuts, make shortsighted business decisions, and generally create cracks and fissures in a brand's scaling architecture that aren't often apparent until it's almost too late...

Look no further than a space a lot of you are already familiar with (for better or worse):

Facebook ads.

In the media buying space, particularly for paid social, traditional media buyers are obsessed with this tunnel vision approach, focused singularly on surface-level KPIs and front-end metrics like cost-per-click, cost-per-purchase and ROAS. They allege these statistics reveal whether your advertising campaigns are successful.

And they would point to that...

...if you defined successful advertising campaigns in a silo, outside of the health of a business. Which they usually do. 🤦‍♀️ 🤦🏻‍♀️ 🤦🏽‍♀️ 🤦🏾‍♀️ 🤦🏿‍♀️

OR

...if you're only looking at the very front-end performance of your ads as the barometer by which you assess the success of your growth. Which is problematic for a litany of reasons I'll get into in a bit.

OR

...if, for example, you're marketing to exclude and filter out millions of people off the bat and intend to watch prospects fall off at every point of the customer journey (from viewing the ad to clicking through to the product to adding to cart to initiating checkout to purchase) with nothing in place to re-engage them but a few flimsy cart abandon emails and a retargeting ad or two.

Which leaves massive amounts of money on the table and destroys the efficiency of every marketing initiative you have in play.

These shortsighted assumptions and practices are built on shortsighted analyses that make brands jump to shortsighted conclusions. Which leads to shortsighted decisionmaking, yielding returns in the short-term that pale in comparison to what's been left on the table having opted out of the longer term play.

This is the impact of non-inclusive marketing. Where a marketer or marketing decisionmaker is driving marketing on pure volume, trying to reach broad audiences yet filtering out scores of potential buyers with a single narrowly-tailored targeting or message to grab the lowest hanging fruit, and ignoring the rest– potentially millions–who would have bought had they run into anything throughout the journey that spoke to their concerns, needs, and the way they digest information.

Yet that's the standard. Why? Because even though it's significantly less efficient, non-inclusive marketing is also significantly less work.

And with 15 to 30 accounts to contend with and a higher up breathing down their neck to scrape together enough time to add 5 more so they can hit the agency's revenue numbers next quarter, it's all they have time for.

So they take the easy way out and build and manage marketing funnels and consideration journeys that are so riddled with gaps and missing pieces that 98% (sometimes more) wander off without buying... usually never to be heard from again.

That's an awful lot of people. And an awful lot of money spent to get them to click through for naught.

Yet they're okay with that 1-2% conversion rate, some being blithely unaware that that sort of performance is below standard, and many knowing but not caring at all.

Because as far as an eCommerce media buyer is concerned, for example: they're only responsible for what's in the ad account and maybe the layout of a product page. They're not often focused on the optimization of the product, the strength of the front-end offer, or the myriad of ways it must be marketed to a myriad of audiences, at the same time.

The ads speak to one type of buyer, buying for one particular reason.

The product page is designed for another type of buyer, perhaps one with low-information attributes for instance.

The cart and checkout is designed for a different type of buyer still.

The cart recovery campaign speaks to one type of person who isn't buying for one type of reason (usually price sensitivity, even though there are SO many other reasons why other people pass on the product).

All other types of buyers, all other ways buyers consume information, all other types of reasons they would be intrigued or repelled, are ignored and fall off during what is usually severely inadequate testing in half-baked testing environments.

And even though the numbers are as clear as day, no one managing these accounts this way seems interested in discovering why the 9,800 people (or more) click through, intrigued about your product...and then change their mind and don't make a purchase at all. And certainly no one seems to be wondering what each channel's role is or isn't across that consideration process.

Now, some drop-off is unavoidable. But at that level? Contrary to popular belief, that should not be par for the course. It doesn't have to be. But ask around, and those who run Mediocre Marketing will sing a different tune.

Marketing decisionmakers rarely ask themselves the question, "How does the entire scaling architecture of the brand (the channels and their performance, tech stack, content, offers, retention stack, product costs, operational expenses, cashflow, and more) get in the way of our acquisition and scaling efforts? How does each channel support or impede the other in the goal of getting the sale? What roles do they play, if any, in plugging the gaps and holes across the buyer consideration process?"

That's the job. Taking every relevant element of the business into consideration before charting the path to smoother, seamless scaling and growth.

Traditional media buyers who generally work in isolation from other channels, don't consider the rest to be their responsibility. Even if there's plenty more purchases to be gained (more efficiently) from just taking the time to build things out properly. They're usually doing their best.They've just taken on so many other accounts and clients that they just don't have that kind of time and have spent so many years getting by with the bare minimum.

This is why they rely so heavily on 1 to 2% conversion rate benchmarks. But benchmarks are simply indicative of what the average marketers and business owners are achieving using Mediocre Marketing. They're not an indicator of what an eCommerce brand should expect when building a strong marketing program.

And if you're a brand that enjoys high impulse buy rates or is priced under, say, $20 – these conversion rate benchmarks would never even apply to you at all.

The reality is that scaling and growth is a lot more nuanced and model-dependent than everyone is willing to admit.

And truly great marketing and advertising defies the law of gravity by embracing that nuance and overcoming the inherent, pervasive resistance in the market. Part of that means getting different types of people, who consume information differently, who resonate at different frequencies, and who have different objections and use cases for your product, to mentally say YES at every microconversion, every microstep along the consideration process, along every unique sale path...

...after every line of copy, after every five seconds of a video, after every click they make around a product page, add to cart page, or checkout page.

Inclusive marketing doesn't just optimize the funnel. It optimizes the unique thought sequences that support the conversion, and it continues that process long after the first purchase to support additional conversions from that buyer over and over again, for years to come.

Not just on one channel. On all of them, in different ways. Operating in sync with one another and together, aligned with the operational realities of the business. This is critical not to gloss over; it's the crux of the whole argument.

And this. Takes. Work.

To save time and energy, most would rather simply acquiesce to the laws of gravity and allow 2x to 5x the number of buyers you could have had to simply fall through the cracks. Most would rather keep their heads down and not engage with, share data with, or learn from other teams on other channels or in other departments. Yet they'll just chalk the inefficiencies all up to the game.

This why the agenda –of traditional media buyers, marketing agencies, marketing managers and even CMOs– to sacrifice long-term stability and gains for short-game hacks and strategies in favor of bare bones, shortcut-driven fulfillment is often diametrically opposed to your own long-term goals and those of your brand.