Marketing is Simple. Then Why Do We Mess it Up?
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Loading ...People sometimes make marketing sound more complicated than building a nuclear reactor. It isn’t. I started my career designing nuclear reactors so I should know!
The marketing problem is simply this. We have something to sell. Our customers are spread out across the country and across the world. But our customers don’t know we exist. And even when they do, they need to be convinced that buying from us is better than buying from the competition.
That’s it. Everything else is sales, delivery, and support.
Marketing’s job is to build a compelling story and reach it to various audiences in ways that are interesting and relevant to those audiences.
It is in the building and the telling of the story that companies mess up. I figure we do this in three ways.
One, companies blow their story by pretending to be more than what they are. An IT services company that is good at writing code wants to be known as a business transformation partner. An engineering services company doing stress analysis wants to also offer prototyping. A market research firm that polls doctors for a pharmaceutical client wants to be an analytics consultant providing insights for new product development.
Such stories stretch credibility. Companies deliver value within a fairly narrow context. In the rush to either expand our market segment or go up the value chain, we often spread our stories too thin. Read the websites of 7 out of 10 IT services companies through the eyes of a customer and you will find them high on promises but low on results.
Two, companies tell their stories badly. Often, this is because the story is muddled to start with. But even when the company stays focused on its core promise, the story is, in many cases, just badly told. Inexperienced employees or agency copywriters are tasked with creating marketing collateral, websites, customer stories and presentations. Not surprisingly, these fail to connect with the intended audience.
Companies must understand that they have one story but many audiences. Each audience is interested in a different angle. Prospects want to hear about value-for-money, employees are interested in growth and stability, investors want to hear about cash flow and price-earnings multiples, analysts want to hear about innovation, the media wants to hear about change and trends, governments want to hear about job creation—one story but very different angles. Our story must be nuanced for the different grammar and language of each of these audiences. Good marketing starts with great content and then needs great story telling.
Three, companies don’t spend enough to reach the stories to their audiences. Most CEOs give marketing departments a ridiculously low budget and advise them to learn from the examples of an Infosys or a Google on how to build a brand at no cost. They forget that Infosys was virtually unknown for the first ten years of its existence and that Google was a category killer in a way very few companies can hope to be.
I’m not a big believer in zero money marketing. Oh sure, I believe in the power of word-of-mouth and social media and PR and all things free, but it is foolish to believe that these alone will result in a regular and substantial pipeline of demand and inquiries.
How do we make enough people aware of our story? We need to advertise, attend trade shows, go online, appear in the media, become visible in the community. This costs time, effort, and money. Without it, we may as well wink in the dark. No one but us will know.
Post Contributed by Vijay Menon
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I guess the challenge is to ‘rightly’ understand business objectives and further ‘rightly’ communicate it to the ‘right’ audience….
well it is said that there is nothing right or wrong but nonetheless ultimately its all about
Right Message
Right Communication Channel
Right Audience
No doubt content and its packaging is very important but I strongly feel above all it is imperative to have a clear Marketing vision aligning with the business vision.