musings...

There’s a lot to the fine art of marketing, and it’s a dynamic skill area, where the technology and means can change frequently, but it’s also fair to say that the underlying “needs” remain fundamentally the same, and I’m not always sure that new companies (and old, for that matter) get them all correct, nor weight them appropriately in their business plans, or rather more tellingly, in their business execution. So, in handy list format, here’s my top 20 list of marketing things you need to get right:

1. Marketing is about touch-points, in essence, about the places that customers touch your business (or where your business touches potential customers). Even though it can see counter-intuative, make sure your marketing department (or, as usual in small businesses, your marketing person) has a say in those points. That includes sales, reception (if you have one), telephone automation (if you must) and other interactions with customers. And yes, I do mean ALL interactions.
2. If you’re a start-up, you’re probably “designer” driven (engineer driven, most likely). That’s ass-backwards. Marketing, and their discovery process with your customers should lead your products, offerings, services, even pricing. It’s their show, let them help you. Engineering is essential (or design, or coders, or what-have-you), but your company needs to be marketing-focused, and the earlier you learn that, the better you’ll do.
3. Marketing really should be a board-level function. If done properly, marketing is what helps you drive customer sales, and your business. Make sure marketing has a say on the board.
4. Make sure your marketing manger(s), marketing assistant(s) and out-sourced agency(ies) all have a decent marketing skill-set. An MBA doesn’t usually count. Experience is essential. In marketing. Not something else. SUCCESSFUL experience is even better.
5. Ask your marketing people if they’ve ever actually used your products. If they haven’t, you need new marketing people. Same for any agency you might use.
6. Present a consistent marketing message in all of your dealings with customers. Including support. That does not mean a scripted message. Ever.
7. Have a marketing plan. But don’t become a slave to it. Like business plans, marketing plans are living breathing documents, that will change and update frequently. Don’t try to write a plan that fully describes everything; you’ll fail, and that’s not the point of such a plan, rather, think broad strokes. The fine strokes are what you do every day to make your marketing better.
8. Online marketing and offline marketing are still marketing, and therefore still about the customer. If you split the functions, they need to work together at all times, preferably under the same manager and all with the customer in mind.
9. SEO is not marketing, but a skill and function (if you have people dedicated to it) that report to marketing. “Black-Ops” SEO will hurt you; a competent marketing team would never do anything to hurt the business.
10. Failure is an option. If you are trying to innovate in your marketing (and you should be), then not everything will work. Be prepared to learn from it, and move on. If you just want to run print ads and billboards, that probably won’t work either, but just because they are safe and well known forms of advertising, doesn’t mean you want to do them. Let your marketing people find new ways to reach out to customers on the customer’s terms, trust me, it will work better for your business. Old school is not “retro cool” in marketing. Unless it works for your current business, and it probably doesn’t work as well as it could if you let a competent marketing team working for you.
11. Email marketing is not about SPAM. If you’re spamming people, you’re doing it wrong. If you use email as a customer touch point, make it about the customer, not you. Think the same of your blog.
12. Your marketing defines your business, because it is the visible (and often invisible) view your customers have of your business. Make sure you assign it the proper resources to work for you.
13. If you can, don’t outsource your PR. It is much better done in-house, with someone who cares about the business and KNOWS your business and products. That someone should not be “Kelly from accounts”. PR is, for all but the smallest company, a full-time role. Hire someone experienced, but someone with passion will work as well. Make sure they report directly to your marketing manager or director.
14. The CEO is a marketing resource, not the head of marketing, no matter how much he or she thinks they are. Yes, even if they have a marketing background.
15. Marketing should be about a clear concise message to your customers about who you are and your core values. That’s your marketing message. It’s not, however, a one-off exercise to come up with a mantra and then forget about the whole thing. If you take marketing seriously, your customers will take you seriously.
16. Every company is different. This means every marketing approach will be unique to the company. What you’ve done before might not be what you need to do now. Heed this.
17. Marketing is hard work and takes planning and trial and error. Therefore don’t expect engineering to finish a product and then have “marketing” “release” it within one hour. It can take weeks or months to plan the marketing approach for a product. Make sure you schedule time in to allow for that.
18. Go To Market strategies are essential to the planning process. New products need one, if only to get the whole company thinking about the approach and what you are trying to achieve. Product managers can have input here, you can even let them take a first stab at doing this, but marketing not only own this process, you MUST get them to sign off on it. Please trust me when I say I have never released a product successfully without one, though I have released products without them, and I’ve always lived to regret that.
19. By all means blog, tweet, have fan pages on Facebook and / or video on YouTube. If you let your product folks do this, it will end up about them and you. If you let marketing lead this, it will be about the customer. Be part of the conversation, not a one-sided dialogue.
20. After all the above points, I just want to reiterate: marketing is NOT a “nice to have”, it is an essential part of your success.

Agree? Disagree? Tell me what you think and what I’ve missed below.

Image Credit: Corner Market Paint-in, 1975 by Seattle Municipal Archives on Flickr. Used under creative commons.