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Ever heard the story of Rasputin? According to legend, the “mad monk” survived poisoned cake, toxic wine, multiple gunshots, and even a plunge into an icy river before he finally died. Despite the odds, he kept coming back, healthier and scrappier than ever.

Unfortunately, bad marketing practices demonstrate a lot of the same resilience. All the data in the world can be stacked the other way, but companies keep opting for the familiar, ineffective strategies that dilute the brand, isolate audiences, and deliver dismal ROI. 

Why? It’s easy to buy into the belief that all exposure is good exposure. Especially when changing your approach takes effort, reevaluation, and time. In reality, misaligned, half-baked, and antiquated techniques drain budget, slow down improvement, and crowd out the work that actually moves the needle.

In HexaGroup’s HEX-Files Energy Marketing Podcast, CEO Arnaud Desperz is joined by Peter Shwetz, a seasoned marketing and technology leader, to dig through the graveyard of low-impact marketing practices and discuss fresh, new, and more effective ways to engage audiences. 

Below, we’ll explore Peter’s advice for spotting inefficient habits, aligning sales and marketing, strategically leveraging data and martech, and getting the most from your AI tools. 

Listen to the full episode here >

“It’s not about making mistakes. Mistakes are inevitable. The real problem is refusing to learn from them.”

In energy and industrial marketing, familiarity has a way of turning into situational blindness. “We know this conference. We know these people. It worked five years ago.” That comfort makes it easy for marketers and executives to stop asking whether the channel still produces results. 

Add a fear of disappearing (“What if our competitors are there and we’re not?”) and, without taking the time to revisit or optimize the strategy, bad marketing tactics quietly turn into permanent line items on the budget.

Booth traffic, page views, and vague “visibility” become a scoreboard for campaign effectiveness, and companies rarely ask themselves the more complex questions: 

  • Did this attract the right audience? 
  • Did it create qualified opportunities? 
  • Did it move deals forward?
The first step toward sustainable improvement is simple but uncomfortable: admitting that “we’ve always done it this way” is not a strategy. If you can’t measure the result, or you don’t like the result you’re seeing, that habit doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt.

“Don’t spend a marketing dollar you can’t tie to ROI.”

A lot of immortal marketing habits only survive because no one ever asks them to stand next to the P&L. Instead of blindly trusting in the status quo, remember that every meaningful spend should come with a clear hypothesis and a way to test it. 

The best way to practice this? Before signing off on a big investment, ask yourself the following questions:

  • What behavior are we trying to drive? (Brand awareness, client engagement, qualified leads, something else?
  • How will we know if it worked in 30–90 days?
  • If it doesn’t work, what are we prepared to stop doing or change?

This approach doesn’t mean you should cut out long-term plays like brand building or thought leadership. It means those investments should carry real metrics too — share of voice, branded search, content-assisted opportunities, influence on deal velocity, pipeline, and revenue influenced by events.

If a tactic can’t be connected to any meaningful outcome, companies should be careful not to label it as “legacy evergreen marketing.” It’s inertia with a price tag.

“Sales and marketing budgets belong on the same page.”

Another one of the most common barriers to market efficiencies? When sales and marketing teams have different goals and budgets. 

It usually looks like this: Sales is under pressure to protect and grow the conventional core business. Marketing is tasked with building awareness for a new offering that isn’t quite ready for prime time. 

When sales and marketing are misaligned, potential clients get mixed messages. At a tradeshow, they’re leaving with a totally different set of takeaways than from a sales call. 

Here are a few practical ways to align these two departments: 

  • Aligning spend: Plan budgets together rather than treating them as competing cost centers.
  • Stress-testing priorities: If sales leaders aren’t willing to put their own budget behind a “strategic” campaign, it probably isn’t that strategic.
  • Thinking in time horizons: Near-term campaigns supporting what’s ready to sell today, longer-term initiatives warming the market for what’s coming next year.

When both sides own those decisions and dollars, they stop pulling in opposite directions and start amplifying each other’s impact.

“You shouldn’t market what you can’t measure.”

Sustainable marketing revolves around doing more with the same dollar, a goal that’s only possible through rock-solid data and insights. 

Teams should look beyond raw lead counts and track the whole funnel, especially in long-cycle, complex energy deals. Early indicators such as awareness within target accounts, repeat visits, and content consumption by multiple stakeholders can be just as crucial in late-stage opportunity metrics.

If a campaign underperforms, you need the conviction (and the tooling) to change targeting, rework creative, or shut it down before it quietly eats budget for another year. If a campaign unexpectedly takes off, you should be ready to shift budget and energy toward it instead of treating it as a fluke.

The goal isn’t to chase every weekly fluctuation, but to build a measurement rhythm that allows you to adjust with intention instead of doubling down on what’s not working. 

“Your buyer isn’t who it was five years ago.”

One of the most dangerous assumptions in energy marketing is that the buyer looks the same as they did a decade ago.

Historically, many deals were driven by on-site technical experts. This target audience still matters, but they’re hardly ever the only ones at the table. Today’s buying decisions often involve:

  • Supply chain and procurement, focused on predictability, risk, and year-over-year cost reductions
  • Corporate, ESG, safety, and environmental teams, who care about compliance, performance, and reputation
  • Technical SMEs, who still prioritize reliability and execution

If your campaigns only speak to technical performance, you’re talking to one person in a crowded room. Instead, think like an account strategist, not just a campaign planner. Map the whole decision group (technical, operations, procurement, ESG, safety, finance) and deliberately design messages that address each audience’s definition of value. 

When your brand tells a consistent story that resonates with everyone who has a vote, you’re no longer just selling a service; you’re building a preferred partner.

“Internal marketing might be your biggest missed opportunity.”

Another overlooked bad habit? Assuming that external marketing alone can carry your brand story. 

While everything might feel exciting, aligned, and new from an outside perspective (sharp booth graphics, polished ESG positioning, strong digital campaigns), internally, sellers often revert to legacy services, old talking points, and antiquated case studies. 

Even if what you’re doing is working well, teams should set aside time to occasionally look inward and explore new offering ideas or adjust priorities. 

Teams also change a lot every few years. It’s critical that every employee understands core principles and feels empowered to contribute to the company’s culture and growth. 

Every so often, companies should take time to realign internally on: 

  • What we’re selling
  • Who we’re selling it to
  • How it ties into our brand promises and differentiation
  • How to tell the story in their own voice

As Peter says, when everyone is “singing from the same sheet of music,” external campaigns stop feeling cosmetic and manifest as real momentum. 

“Martech is how you keep score — if you’re ready for it.”

With all the buzz around marketing technology, it’s tempting to believe the right platform will magically fix measurement. In reality, martech is how you measure progress, not how you win the game. 

The right stack can:

  • Give near real-time visibility into what’s working (and what’s not)
  • Show where prospects actually spend time on your site and content
  • Connect campaigns to opportunities and revenue
  • Help keep brand and content consistent across channels

But “right” depends on your reality. How mature is your organization when it comes to making decisions based on data? How complex is your portfolio and footprint? Do you have the people (or partners) who can configure, maintain, and interpret the tools?

“AI is a tool, not a strategy.”

​​AI is everywhere in marketing conversations right now, but it’s essential that companies remember it’s never a replacement for strategy. 

AI can accelerate progress if you know what you’re trying to achieve and have the data to support it. If your content, CRM, and campaign data are messy or incomplete, AI can’t magically conjure insight from thin air.

A better approach: Identify where you already have high-quality data, define the decisions or workflows that are slow or inconsistent, then layer AI where it can clearly improve speed, consistency, or insight and measure that improvement like you would any other investment.

Putting it all together 

Arnaud opens the episode with Einstein’s famous definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. 

You can invest in martech, build dashboards, refine buyer personas, bring in agencies, and experiment with AI. But if leadership isn’t willing to trust the data and act on it, you’ll end up right back where you started: Keeping the same old habits alive and wondering why nothing is changing. 

True marketing evolution requires making hard (but data-backed) decisions: 

  • Dropping a beloved but unproductive event
  • Moving budget from traditional comfort channels into programs that actually move deals
  • Reinvesting in internal enablement 
    instead of one more “visibility” campaign
  • Killing campaigns that don’t work, even if they were somebody’s pet project

Sustainable improvement isn’t about perfection. It’s about building a culture where measurement, alignment, and the courage to change matter more than nostalgia and Rasputin-grade resilience.

Explore more tips for evolving your market strategy: 

Catch the full conversation with Peter Swetz on The HEX-Files, HexaGroup’s energy marketing podcast for leaders who want their growth strategy to work in the real world.

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