What the heck does marketing do anyway? (Part 1 of 2)

What the heck does marketing do anyway?

When I started out in marketing, I was taught that marketing exists to make sales easier and I still believe this definition encapsulates what marketing is there to do.

To make sales easier, marketing needs to:

a)    Help define – and find customers that need your product the most.

b)    Give these customers reasons to change from what they’re doing today.

c)    Give them good reasons to buy from you rather than your competitors.

d)    Back this up with case studies (ideally with ROI figures).

e)    Make the customers’ journey as frictionless as possible.

To achieve these goals, marketing will (or certainly should!) help you build:

Clear go-to-market messaging

Ensuring what you say to your customers resonates with their needs is a crucial responsibility of marketing.

Your initial conversations should be focused on how you solve customer needs rather than the product features that make this happen. In short, customers buy for the benefits your products deliver. This requires an in-depth understanding of your customers’ pain points and how your offering can help resolve their issues.

Your messaging should simplify product complexities and help determine what content is needed by different people at different stages of the buying cycle. In larger organizations, this is usually driven by the product marketing team, however, in smaller organizations, it can be driven by the marketing team as a whole.

This will help you:

a)    Create engaging content for customers and playbooks for your sales team.

b)   Gain credibility through published articles in the press with customer interviews etc.

c)    Understand your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses to sell more effectively.

Pipeline generation

Although smaller organizations will often find it necessary to combine marketing roles, the responsibility of the part of the team responsible for growth marketing is to seek out and engage prospects who meet your ideal customer profile (see our blog post 'How to define your ideal customer’), and help guide them through the funnel with as little friction as possible.

For sales generation in the short term, it makes sense to focus on the low-hanging fruit: customers who are early adopters, whose pain is sufficiently great, need a solution now, and who know your product plays to its greatest strengths.

However, not all your prospects will be ready to buy from you now, and it makes sense to nurture them over time by using multiple touchpoints through different channels (we cover this topic in more detail in our blog ‘Creating sales and marketing campaigns that work’). It’s worth noting that customers only remember your message after hearing it several times.

For long-term pipeline generation, you should use this time to get to know your more risk-averse customers, so that they are aware of your offering, and you have built sufficient credibility at the point they are ready to buy.

To eliminate friction along the way, it is worth working with product marketing to anticipate your prospects’ needs at different stages of the buying decision, paying special attention to where they might hit (often internal) roadblocks, where you may find the sales cycle stalls (see my blog post ‘How to accelerate your sales cycle’).

Campaign creation

When planning your campaigns, you first need to decide what your objectives are. Your objectives might include:

a)    Accelerating customer opportunities through the sales pipeline by making their buying journey easier.

b) Incentivizing customers to buy who are close to making a positive buying decision.

c)    Creating more top-of-funnel prospects.

d)    Helping customers during the evaluation stages of their journey.

Having decided on your objectives for each campaign, you should know which of the buyer personas from your Key Messaging Document you are targeting, where they are in their journey, and what types of content are needed to help them move forward.

For example, the buyer personas for your product might include product managers and CEOs. The channels to reach them might include YouTube, blog posts, sponsored advertising, and LinkedIn groups.

You can think of the customer journey in terms of the top of the funnel (the beginning of their discovery process), the middle of the funnel (the evaluation stage), and bottom-of-funnel (the point at which they are making a buying decision).

[In reality, we tend to be more granular than this, but the sales funnel is covered in a separate blog post ‘How to align sales and marketing’]

Go on to read Part 2.