Last Friday, the brilliantly insightful Corey Eridon of HubSpot castigated P&G for calling their “Facebook experiment” a failure and for the brand’s complete misunderstanding of digital strategy.
In response to the assumption it’s somehow Facebook’s fault P&G fell on its face and had to lay off 6,250 employees, Eridon wrote, “Yes, it’s Facebook’s fault. It’s not P&G’s fault for failing to stay on top of digital trends like learning what EdgeRank is and how it works. It’s not P&G’s fault for relying on third-party assets to build their brand, instead of investing in assets they can control, like their own website and blog. It’s not P&G’s fault for failing to create remarkable content that — and if you know how EdgeRank works you’d know this — gets you more visibility on Facebook due to reader engagement. It’s not P&G’s fault for failing to realize no audience is guaranteed, paid or otherwise, and that audiences are actually earned on a daily basis. And it’s certainly not P&G’s fault for expecting a “new” platform like Facebook to work by slapping on the same old-school ad tactics they’ve been using (and, based on their rampant layoffs, not using well) for decades.”
Whoo! It’s like you can visualize Eridon in a cage match schooling an army of P&G mascots on how shit gets done in today’s world of digital marketing.
But Eridon, much like everyone at HubSpot, isn’t out to crotch punch just for fun. No. She has wisdom and advice to share with P&G. Information the brand could actually act upon to better their marketing and put an end to the $10 billion they waste…uh…spend annually on marketing.
She sites some of the great work P&G brand Charmin has done and how some of that work, coupled with a concerted owned-media approach to marketing could right the brand and put them on a course to better success.
This notion that throwing more money at a problem is rooted in a Neanderthal-like belief that more GRPs, more reach, more frequency or more weight are the answers to all marketing predicaments. When there were just three television networks, one daily newspaper, a handful of radio stations and a few special interest magazine, that approach made perfect sense. In today’s hyper-fragmented, internet-enabled world that approach no longer works. What does work is the creation of interesting, educational, informative and helpful content that is easily found when a person comes looking. Content that enables a brand to become a trusted resource, not an annoying interruption.
And yes, it’s more complicated and involved that just creating a few informative blog posts but helpful content is where it begins. Helpful content garners leads and properly nurtured leads convert to customers.
Check out this infographic for a super simple explanation of inbound marketing…which is what we’re talking about here and what P&G should be doing.
