What Marketing Is Not
The below is a manifesto. It’s a micro-blog about life inside marketing and the mis-understandings that it (still) experiences as a profession, trade and business function. If you too experience this in your work environment please like, comment and share your story.
What Marketing is NOT:
- Pretty fliers
- Expensive booth set-ups
- Booth babes (had to throw that one in)
- Incessant email marketing (e.g. you-will-not-stop emailing me!)
- Creepy follow-me-everywhere-on-the-web banner ads
- Flashing or dancing banner ads
- You_Won_An_iPad2 sweepstakes
- “Please RT” – come on, are you desperate?
- Weekly, maybe even daily, flash sales events (um, if your product isn’t that cool to be sold full price…what’s up?)
- Clip art from 1985 (please, look outside of MS ClipArt for your graphic design needs)
- Obnoxious Twitter posts or Instagram pics about the bagels your team’s having with the awesome raisins in it . (Unless the profile is your own. In that case, share-all at your own risk.)
- Total and utter lack of interaction with the rest of an organization (e.g. sales over here, marketing over here, BD over here….and les bring everyone together maybe 1x/quarter to discuss bigger strategy. Um, where’s “team” in that?)
- “Please give me results, but don’t worry about conversion. We have a sales team to do that.” Excuse me, if marketing (social, email, events, etc) isn’t about driving revenue what’s the purpose?
- Massive lead volume, perhaps from gimmicky campaigns, but minimal to zero long-term engagement/conversion.
Why else is marketing the last thing brought to the table in start-ups?
Why is marketing still the first program get cut, like a fine arts program, when budgets get tight?
Why else do CEOs and CFOs still have minimal expectations that an investment in marketing, big or small, will improve bottom-line?
We, the marketers, need to drive more accountability in our work. We need to ask more, do more and be vigilant about making our expertise known as an essential ingredient to the success or failure of a business. For what’a a great business idea if we’re only relying on a “feet-on-the-street”… or an amazing product, but no one to share that story across the larger industry via awesome content?
Get scrappy. Get real. And [love] marketing for all it really can do.
The Back-Up Plan, The Everyday Plan
It’s 7am. You wake up to a brief email with a subject line, “Please call me.”
The body of the email, “Your almost non-existent marketing budget has been just been suspended until further notice. But your monthly revenue targets, no change. Please email me your back-up plan.” My back-up plan? *@#!
That’s right, the back-up plan. The plan that makes the world keep ticking at ramming speed (to quote Ben Hur), but on less man power and less spending power.
As marketers, we hit this crossroad at one point or another. And especially if you are a small business marketer, it’s well, your mantra. It’s a form of survival that we must either lean in on or…find another line of work.
Over the past decade I have worked on all sorts of brands, F500 and start-up, and all ranges of budgets. But a common theme pervades – get scrappy. Call it a desire for accountability (necessary), or a lack of resources (quite common); but the call to make amazing things happen on less occurs frequently. And at this juncture many either excel or fail.
Getting scrappier asks us to do (3) things really well:
1. Dig deep. At risk of sounding philosophical, limited resources force us to do two things:
- Identify what we are really good at (are you an awesome copywriter? do you have an amazing background in analytics?)
- Consistently deliver marketing events/programs that drive (tangible) results (no results after 7-14 days? move on)
2. Start talking. Maybe you are new to a job? Or perhaps your small business doesn’t have a clearly defined target audience yet?
The Little Engine “I think I can” mentality – flip it on. But most importantly, start engaging in (online) conversations. That’s right, you will learn more out of blog posts, industry forums, and your social networking experiences in 30 days than anywhere else. You will learn who your competitors are, what they are talking about, what their customers (or your prospects) are asking for, and most importantly you will glean a lifetime experience of building a personal and professional brand from virtual networking by “tuning in” to cyber chatter.
3. Make lists. Some hate, some love. I love lists. For me, lists enable me to effectively prioritize everything from my life, to which marketing projects I must get done.
The purpose of lists is two-fold:
- The adage if you write something down, it will stick, is 100% true. Write it down, more likely to get done.
- It forces you to downsize. Think about it. How realistic is it to (re)define your messaging strategy, post original content 20 times on Twitter per day, set-up a new email campaign, and set-up a reporting dashboard for all inbound efforts you have live? In a week, doable. In a 24-48 hours, not likely. Take that one step further. What if you could only do one thing to deliver incremental results? You get the point – get scrappy.
Want to take the next step to creating simplified, effective marketing?
Download your FREE copy of Get Scrappier here. Or buy here to read on your favorite digital device. Do more on less. Get Scrappy.
Signing In, Signing On
Attitude. Some might say it separates the successful from the mediocre. In the field of marketing, it’s the distinction between the passive vs. the aggressive. And by passive, I don’t mean weak. And by aggressive, I don’t mean rude.
Rather passive is about signing in - doing what’s (minimally) required to get a job done. Versus aggressive is about signing on - doing what’s not necessary, but what should be done to take something beyond what the expectations were and are.
As marketers, and as individuals, we have this choice every day. To simply sign in, to check a box that we’ve done our job. Or to sign on and lean hard to not just find a new way to do something…but to do it. To sell it, to break through glass ceilings.
Attitude doesn’t just sell ideas, it lives it. Attitude isn’t just entertaining a concept, it’s making it happen. Sign on, or sign off.
