4 Marketing Lessons To Take From #Election2016

1. Believing your own press is still dangerous. It's great when your business has gotten to a stage where leadership is confident and you have the customers and business growth to back up your accolades. But it's a slippery slope when you start seeking out only those who reinforce your worldview and brand. It's easy to get comfortable with the "likes" and delete the comments from naysayers on social media that don't jive with what you think. Doing business in a myopic echo chamber of your own voice and predictable algorithm, often comprised of employees, happy clients and vendors is counter to growth, innovation, customer acquisition, and retention. Just ask Hillary Clinton, who ran a lackluster campaign that, in the end, was blindsided.

2. Never underestimate your target audience. Days after this election, many are still scratching their collective heads over who voted for whom and why. Making decisions and running your marketing program based on basic demographic data and assumptions doesn't cut it anymore. We live in an algorithm-fueled, sell-your-social media-soul for a Which Celebrity Do I Resemble? quiz world. Our customers expect us to know them. And know them well. If you're not regularly checking in with clients during, after and in between a project or sale, then you are putting your customer experience at risk. Is surveying your client part of your process? If it is, is the survey methodology one that doesn't suppress their honest feedback? Have you mapped your customer experience? Without defining customer's experiences, brands become victim to whatever people feel and share.

3. Content is still King but can the King be trusted? Aunt Sue's post from "Red-Box-Media Co." or your college friend's "Blue News Beat" clickbait article sent us into a social media frenzy this past year. And it even went beyond people behind the scenes, bots got in on it, too! Staying on top of the content, discerning what was actually true, was a full-time job to which few seemed to want to apply. The veracity of media and social media content sharing will be a critical challenge moving forward. If social media users weren't suspicious and savvy before, they will be now. Your content, whether true or aggrandized, is now suspect to the inspection of a very skeptical online audience. It better be good and rooted in truth.

4. Social media is not a bulletin board. It's a daily commitment with responsibility. It's not show up, throw up, and then click the home button to check e-mail. Nor is it a megaphone. It's a telephone. Remember those things? It only works well when there is conversation. Conversation is hard, takes time, and requires thoughtful dialogue and sharing. There wasn't much in the way of reasonable discourse this election year. However, there is some evidence of people venturing out to their keyboards again to try to understand each other and make changes in the world. Baby steps. We can all work on being better social media conversationalists (online and off) rather than shouters and information dumpers.