Why Everyone Thinks They Know More Than a Marketer
Marketing is everywhere. From ads seen online to images posted on Instagram to videos on YouTube, everyone constantly uses the same marketing tools that many use to promote their businesses. However, omnipresence has another side, so everyone thinks they’re a marketer. From your spouse to your best friend to every co-worker you work with, I’m willing to bet that almost everyone has an opinion on the “best” way to market your product or service.
While marketing is fun and seems easy enough for anyone to do, to be done well, it needs to be strategic and tied back to data that drives ROI. Data is what leads marketing, and you need it to save energy and likely money and resources for a meager return.
I’ve had a handful of clients hire me because their understanding of marketing is based on the creative design that exemplifies their next big product or service. While this is a component of marketing, it doesn’t work without a well-thought-out strategy based on mounds of research and data to drive the message. This is usually a joint effort between marketing and sales and should always tie back to the organization’s strategic plan.
Since today’s interconnected world has given everyone a voice and a platform, one thing that differentiates a person with access to social media from a marketing professional is that those of us in the business study market trends and adjust strategies accordingly. The strategies are everywhere—from social media to blogs, op-eds, bylines, SEO and SEM, content, creative, and the list goes on.
There are four things everyone should know about a marketing professional and why they are likely a better guide than, say, your top-selling account executive.
Analytics are essential. Data rules in marketing and marketers need custom implementations, which means custom tracking. This must be done in concert with sales, but marketing should drive that conversation based on the extensive data analyzed. In the B2B world, marketing and sales data are becoming one.
We know your audience…and we know it well! Marketers love research! We have watched and followed engagements, looked at competitors, and conducted surveys. From all this, we have created the perfect persona for that customer-centric campaign that’ll resonate with your audience. This hopefully equates to conversions and revenue.
Valuable content is your billboard. The story matters, and its success depends on the emotional connections you forge with your clients and customers. Your marketing efforts should always be relatable. Our job as marketers is not to create more content. It has never been about that. It’s about making the right content that will cause the maximum behavior change in your customers. To be possible, what is being created must be valuable, useful, compelling, and different.
Strategies don’t happen in a vacuum. The best strategies are inspired by creative and critical thinking. What are your favorite brands up to, and what makes them so impactful? All ideas should be fair game, and this requires a team effort to come up with the best result, but the driver of this conversation should be marketing-centric to support those sales initiatives.
If you think profitability, win rate, reputation, and brand are essential to your company, we marketers acknowledge that it takes a small army to represent a brand best. However, give marketing credit where credit is due. The goal is always to yield the highest return on investment, and if you trust your marketing team, I’m pretty sure you won’t be let down.
