When you think about marketing, what do you think of? Clever advertising? Greenwashing? Being sucked into an infinite scroll on your favourite social media platform? Perhaps it’s those intrusive emails that you never signed up to? Or people in black polonecks, workshopping ideas over a spiced chai dirty oat milk latte. In Shoreditch.
Whatever you think, it might not be positive. And it might not be about the apparently simple but infinitely complex challenge of communicating the relevance of your wonderful products or services.
At its best, marketing is a noble profession. It’s about empathy. It’s about trying to understand humanity. It’s the quest to deeply understand people, their world-views and their values. The things that worry or delight them. What they really care about. It’s about listening to and understanding how other people see the world and meeting them where they are.
The ‘meeting them’ bit is where marketing intersects with sales. This is the essential bit. And it’s often the missing link with less-experienced marketing teams. So how does this affect the way your marketing team should function? You can start to understand this by asking yourself three questions:
- To what extent do your marketing people understand your ideal target customer? I mean really understand them. Like, the amount of time they could take to go from the vague sense of having a problem or a desire, through thinking about what they might do about it, to finally opting for your product or service. Don’t muddle this amount of time with ‘how long you’d like them to take’.
- How can your business engage with your target customers in an appealing, non-pushy way, while they’re at the early stages of this ‘buying journey’? Hint: it’s not about bombarding them with sales messages.
- To what extent do your marketing people understand the sales/new business and account management functions? And how well do the people in these functions understand marketing, how it can and can’t support them?
I worked with a social enterprise whose marketing team was busy with events, newsletters, website updates, social media content and other activities. The CEO, a recent internal hire, had developed a sensible commercially-focused plan to build revenue over the coming few years. But she wasn’t sure what role marketing might play in helping her to achieve it. She saw marketing as an expense rather than a function that would support the revenue growth she wanted. So she didn’t want to further invest in marketing. And she was right. It was a content creation function, and a cost. The connection between their marketing activity and revenue performance was sketchy at best.
So how could she have started fixing this?
The piece she was missing was the connection between her revenue targets, and what they meant in a marketing context. What was a typical customer worth? How many new customers did they need? How many enquiries would it take to win them? What would it take to generate those enquiries? And how could the connection between marketing and revenue generation be tracked?
The answers to these questions form the basis of the brief that a marketing team should be working on. The moment that brief exists, marketing stops being a cost and starts having a job to do.
Of course the certainty of your business’s future revenues is tied to things that are difficult or impossible to influence, like the economic and political climate. But a commercially focused, measurable, repeatable marketing function will give you the best possible chance. This can only come from a marketing plan that’s focused on unambiguous commercial outcomes, and deep insight into your prospective customers’ needs and psychology.