One of the most important drivers of your business are Marketing teams. Want it or not, but you have to admit — there is no income and business growth without marketers being involved.
In the modern times, when things change so fast around us, it is hard to give a clear explanation what is marketing team for to all your employees, especially if they don’t care about it and are involved in occupancy totally not related to marketing activities. Let’s try to make it clear for all.
What is Marketing?
Let’s say simple — marketing is what brings attention to your brand or services and what makes your audience generate interest in paying you for whatever you sell. Marketing is a set of activities and actions to generate company income, which leads to employees satisfaction and pay slips.
“Marketing is not the art of promotion only or some kind of magical tricks you play with consumers. It’s neither pure data and storytelling. Marketing is a psychology, it’s what they think and how they feel.”
From the Wikipedia:
Marketing satisfies these needs and wants through the development of exchange processes and the building of long-term relationships.
Different dictionaries provide different explanations on the term “marketing”, but do you really care about theoretical definitions?
I care about end results and not about how smart you name them. And the end result should be only one — continuously increasing in ROI, maximizing brand awareness and improving in generating customer communications & interactions with a brand or business.
Do You Know What Your Marketing Is Doing?
But the way how you do your marketing is different among industries and can be truly opposite to what you or anyone else has done before. You simply can not use same techniques in B2B product marketing and B2C eCommerce marketing, you can not engage the audience in the same way in the automotive industry and SaaS product as an example. Marketing has to be individual and strictly industry specific. If you still doing template based plannings and campaigns or copy/paste what you were doing years ago — Welcome to a losers club. We don’t want it to happen.
Nowadays, marketing has changed as new technologies are growing. Users and buyers are not buying your sh*t anymore. They pay only for what they need. And they need only what is trending now and in right place.
In some point, you may disagree and say that old school techniques are still working. Yes, I agree, they do work with old school audience who still do not know what “web browser” and “Google” means. But are there many of them? Even dealing with old-school guys involves new techniques…
That’s a reality. Admit it or not.
Product Launch Marketing.
Launching a new product is most exciting for all teams. For some companies, it means a start of the new period when you can sit and wait for your ROI after months of investments in your dream. Well, sorry to tell you, but it doesn’t end here. Product launch is just a start of your aggressive marketing journey, and no matter what is your budget or how long-term are your plans. You have to do it right or roll back time and decide not to create a product. Assuming that time machine is not invented officially yet, you have to think about marketing a product the right way.
That’s a no-return point. Or you want to fail? Hope you don’t.
Launching a product involves a complex of solutions starting with routine journalists outreach, SEO and link building and goes all the way along with storytelling, communications, blogging, storytelling, customer support and so on. Keeping an interest to your product is generating new leads and brings success to sales teams.
Did we forgot about User Experience?
Whatever you do — make sure that your target audience is always engaged and their user journey is transparent and not complicated.
Your competition never sleeps. You do it wrong — someone else does it right. You know what happens next.
Here where marketing comes with all those boring market researches, go to market strategies and all other plannings. To create a stunning user experience on your website and lead every visitor to purchase is not a five-minute deal. Then customer support, again brand awareness, product roadmaps, advertising… We can continue that list to endless… All marketing activities that are done for product launch, talking not only about UX are leading to one point — grow the product and generate more and more leads, sales, awareness and whatever your goals are. UX engineers will understand. They probably hate marketers during that period of time. 🙂
Growth Hacking.
Growth Hacker as a position? Never heard about it?
A new term that is commonly used in product marketing. So what is that and how it’s different from what we got used to — “online marketing”?
Growth hacking is a marketing technique developed by technology startups which use creativity, analytical thinking, and social metrics to sell products and gain exposure.It can be seen as part of the online marketing ecosystem, as in many cases growth hackers are using techniques such as search engine optimization, website analytics, content marketing and A/B testing.
Growth hackers focus on low-cost and innovative alternatives to traditional marketing, e.g. utilizing social media and viral marketing instead of buying advertising through more traditional media such as radio, newspaper, and television.
Growth hacking is particularly important for startups, as it allows for a “lean” launch that focuses on “growth first, budgets second.” Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Airbnb and Dropbox are all companies that use growth hacking techniques.
When browsing through LinkedIn, you can find many of your connections who have changed their positions from Marketing Manager to Head of Marketing, and then Marketing Lead and finally to Growth Hackers. As described above, it makes total sense. But does it really matter?
Marketing became very segmented lately, and a definition of Marketer became too broad. The specific terms are developed to describe more specific what a person is doing and what are his goals.
Growth Hacking is something that combines traditions of Business Development, Marketing and Promotion through all available channels with optimizing budget to getting more with less. Real Growth Hackers are always hungry. They don’t stop on the road to success and don’t eat until they hunt their meal themselves.
Understand Growth Hacking as it sounds — making your brand grow. Isn’t it what we all need? The question is how they do it. That’s individual to each industry and personal to a marketer.
Do we really care? We need results and ROI. We only start asking questions when marketing doesn’t reach business goals in most of the situations. But that’s another story…
So why Marketing is important for Employees Satisfaction?
“Many people use the terms “satisfaction” and “engagement” to refer to not just the basic core needs of job satisfaction, but also the added meaning, motivation, and commitment of “engagement”. There is nothing wrong with that. As long as your company is measuring and striving for the elements that we include in our definition of engagement, it really does not matter what you call it”. — Custom Insight.
All marketing activities are focused on company growth, and it doesn’t matter are we talking about enterprises or start-ups. All of them need brand awareness, product sales, leads generations or, simpler to say, cash.
As long as marketing is doing its job right and brings ROI and income to a company, it affects all other departments and employees in a positive way. So does in negative, if marketing is not reaching goals and company wastes budgets and resources on useless activities.
My answer to all who is curious “So what is marketing doing?” is clear and simple: marketers are generating opportunities for a company in general and for employees individually, so all team can have jobs, room to grow and right motivation together with a company growth and income increase!
Choosing a right marketing model can lead to increasing a performance and employee motivation with new opportunities, increase in salaries and, for sure, free cookies and other perks. Same about choosing a wrong way — you can lose it all.
