If you don’t want your business to be a leaking bucket then you do.
•If you’re interested in making money, then you do.
•If you’re interested in seeing a return on the money you spend, then you do.
•If you’re trying to shape the perception of your brand in such a way that it seeps into your communication, team members, and brand assets then you do.
Your marketing strategy is the starting point. Not buying Google ads, not setting up a twitter account, and most definitely, not hosting an event. These are all tactics. Your start with the strategy because it informs the tactics you deploy. It gives you the direction so you’re targeted in your approach and give your business an opportunity to survive.
Marketing is generally all the activities involved in order to “go to market” and generate sales. Your marketing strategy should support the overall revenue objectives of the organization. If your marketing is not driving the bottom line at all, you need to re-evaluate what you are doing.
“Tactics without strategy is dumbing down our discipline. If marketers want to be taken seriously they must end their preoccupation with tactics and tools and focus on their strategy, devised by thoroughly researching, segmenting and targeting their market.”
What Marketing Is Not
There’s a lot of misconceptions about marketing out there and rightfully so. Mark Ritson puts it so clearly when he says a lot of marketers lack training leading to them focusing on the wrong things. Here are some common misconceptions notwithstanding:
- the goal is to trick customers
- it’s all advertising
- it’s a soft skill
- marketing is dead
- works in a silo from the product, sales, engineering
- it’s just managing the website and twitter account
Core of Marketing
Now you know what marketing is not, what really is marketing about? A lot of things. Breaking it down below into 8 key areas gives you an idea of which function is responsible for what.
At the end of the day, what marketing looks like at an organization is really dependent on the type of business, stage of growth, and industry. It is not uncommon to be the only marketing hire at an SMB or in some cases, be part of a really small team. Your organization might focus on a number of these or all of them. It depends.
Product Marketing: this sits at the intersection of marketing, sales, product & engineering.
• Core functions include user research (understanding who the user is and what they want), identifying market opportunities, product packaging, pricing, messaging.
Brand: it asks the question, “how do we want to be perceived”
•Functions: voice and tone, look and feel, positioning, awareness (how will the brand make an impact in the market)
Demand Generation: it can also be called lead marketing or growth marketing. It is about generating leads and nurturing them through to a sale.
Functions: it creates a pipeline of leads for sales, optimizes lead funnels, experiments with channels, nurtures leads.
Events & community: focuses on connecting with prospects and customers and strategic partners.
Sales Enablement: it’s usually in an enterprise company or long sales cycles. Functions: educate sales, writing case studies.
Public Relations: understand where customers consume information and shape brand perception.
Content & Creative: bringing campaigns to life for other marketing areas.
Operations & Analytics: they are responsible for managing software tools, optimizing workflows and ensuring the health of the data
Where to start?
Before deciding what core marketing area to focus on and how it informs your strategy, you first of all need to have a picture of where the company sits in the overall landscape.
Always start with research.
Always start with research.
Always start with research.
This cannot be overemphasized. So what do you research?
Start with conducting a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats). The strengths and opportunities are things that are helpful to the company while the weaknesses and threats are things that harmful. The strengths and weaknesses can be controlled and impacted because they are internal while the opportunities and threats can be planned for. You plan for them in the sense that you know they are coming, so you create a strategy that can best take advantage of the situation even if it is a threat.
Speaking to internal stakeholders
What are the key stakeholders' interests? You need to interview them because it helps uncover information that is helpful in setting strategy. The point is not to act on everything they say but it helps to determine how best to get them on board and build consensus on the strategy. It also helps set expectations and drive alignment. You want to understand their concerns and make them feel a part of the process. Some questions you can ask:
- What’s our biggest challenge as a company?
- What is our company mission, in your eyes?
- What are the biggest sales and marketing opportunities?
- What do you think is our competitive differentiation?
- And what makes us special? What are we, just, doing well?
- And what should we be doing more of?
- What are the competitors doing well
- And which competitors are you most worried about?
- What do you view as our ideal client profile?
Speaking to customers
Know what is going on in the market, what language do they use, understand the competitive alternative, and how they perceive the company. Understand what problem they are trying to solve and how your product comes in.
Creating a cohesive strategy
From your research, you’re able to categorize your learnings into the core marketing areas and place each one on SWOT chart based on what is working well, what is broken, and what hasn’t been tried before. With this, you have a story taking shape and you can see which areas have missing pieces affecting the larger story. This helps you determine what makes sense for a strategy.
Over 100 hours of video content and 12 weeks later…
I am a CXL certified growth specialist!
This brings me to the end of my growth marketing mini degree with CXL Institute. It’s incredible to look back and see how deciding to do one thing (applying for the scholarship) has unlocked so much clarity for me personally.
I’ll be honest, it was not easy throughout. Online learning is such a great test of perseverance because so many things can come up to distract you from finishing what you start. For one, we are in the midst of a global pandemic and that alone takes a toll on your well being to perform optimally. I will say though, it’s not only been a fantastic learning experience, but also a great distraction. It gave me something to focus on every day.
There were some classes I struggled with like Technical SEO and A/B Testing in particular, but that ok. I don’t need to understand every single thing the first time around. I’d say about 70% of the content was easily digestible with the instructors speaking clearly and breaking down the concepts well.
With better clarity on what I want my next steps to look like, I’m excited about my next adventure!
