Faith, Hope and … Marketing

Overview

Business today is more competitive than ever, so getting your product or service in front of the customer becomes a major challenge. 24/7 access to information and specifications, combined with online product and service reviews makes it critical to ensure you’re getting your message out. And not only your message, but the right message.

Which is where Marketing comes in.

This brief article will explain why Marketing is crucial to the success and growth of your business.

Spray and Pray

Marketing. It’s one of the most important aspects of any business, but oftentimes one that seems to get the least respect and resources. It’s also one of the hardest-to-define and most complicated to do functional roles within the company.

So why is Marketing an area that everyone thinks they can do without? Or that they can do themselves?

The truth is, businesses of all sizes, from startups to large corporations, turn to the “spray and pray” philosophy of Marketing more often than they should. This school of thought believes that Marketing is not really a discipline and that it is easy to do. And since it’s easy to do, then anyone can do it, so why should an investment be made in that area?

Instead of investing in the necessary personnel, doing the required rigorous research, and gathering, analyzing and interpreting data so that they will clearly understand their market and competitors, businesses often choose to just “wing it” when developing content, messaging and even campaigns. Marketing materials are often created (if you want to call it that) by product owners, engineers or (Gasp!) even sales people who think they understand the product or service well enough that they don’t need a marketing professional to help position and promote the product.

They have faith in their own abilities as professionals in their own fields, so they have faith that they can pick up the skills needed to properly market a product.

And that is where it all breaks down…

The Missing Link

Without the benefit of Marketing, any lead gen, nurturing, content development, value props, positioning, messaging, and especially campaigns that are created are likely to miss the mark or fail completely.

Why?

Because the rigorous process that Marketing follows when developing anything from a lead gen campaign to a piece of content to a multi-pronged go-to-market strategy is not in place or being followed.

There is no market data, no competitive analysis and insight, no customer research, no voice-of-the-customer, no channel analysis. Nothing. There’s just the belief that they think they know what they’re doing, and besides, how hard can Marketing really be?

In other words, all the components used by Marketing to help ensure success are missing.

All that exists is hope – they hope that what they did on their own will work.

Is it possible that it will work? Sure, it’s possible.

But is it likely? No.

Summary

Just as Engineering, Product Development, Product Management and Sales have their place within the product life cycle, so does Marketing. Each function has very clearly defined and specific roles and responsibilities and would never consider handing them over to other departments. Why should it be any different for Marketing?

Endless studies have shown that trying to make sales without marketing is less than optimal and the chance of success is significantly decreased. Therefore, it stands to reason that Marketing is a proven, critical component to business success. 

Marketing ensures that the right data is gathered and analyzed, the right customer is targeted, the right message is developed, the right format is used, the right time is determined, and most importantly, the right channels are used.

And in doing so, provides the business with the best chance of success.

It’s not just spray and pray.

© 2019 – Richard Hatheway, Catalyst Strategic Marketing

All rights reserved.