So real quick I wanted to highlight one thing that the World Cup tournament taught us about marketers across the planet, and that is this. Marketers are lazy. I mean really, really lazy. Before the tournament many of the social media giants were sending emails out basically telling marketers to stop thinking and follow some simple formula for “world cup […]

So real quick I wanted to highlight one thing that the World Cup tournament taught us about marketers across the planet, and that is this. Marketers are lazy. I mean really, really lazy.

Before the tournament many of the social media giants were sending emails out basically telling marketers to stop thinking and follow some simple formula for “world cup marketing”. What was that formula you ask? To not talk about your business, but to talk about the World Cup instead in an effort to increase user engagement on the platforms.

So why was this lazy World Cup marketing a problem? Well the first question is who benefits? Your not going to gain more business this way, because you visitors are now only interested in sports not your product or service. I mean really are you going to change your business mission to compete with ESPN?

The concept of linking whatever your business does to a large world event has long been the standard practice in marketing, however the big issue is that many businesses aren’t actually affected by many world events so this approach is a waste of advertising resources that could be used elsewhere, like actually speaking to your target audience.

Sadly I wanted to write this post about 5-6 weeks ago but feared that if I had written it then, I would be guilty of taking the same approach, so I waited.

World Cup Marketing Only Benefited The Strong

Now here is the big finale, who actually benefited from this massive increase in traffic, user engagement, and time on site? Those same social media giants that herded everyone like sheep to do what they wanted.

Don’t believe me, how about this Facebook boasted 280 million total number of Facebook interactions — likes, posts and comments and twitter boasted 618,725, which represents the amount of tweets per minute. Just to be clear, these numbers were just for the final. So in one match, these were the numbers of two of the social media giants. Feel free to read more about this here.

So the main question is, has your business received anywhere near this amount of interaction from following this approach? If not, it may be time to start thinking of ways to target your actual market

 TOPIC: World Cup Marketing