What Does Marketing Even Do?
I was first introduced to the concept of marketing at university. It was part of my general education classes, not tied to my major (English, writing option). The class description made “Marketing” sound like a fun, easy class. I just needed to get a good enough grade to pass and have the credits count. I wasn’t thinking that I would ever really need the skills taught in the class.
It was an introduction to marketing. Understanding the basics of what marketing is, and how one would start to think about marketing a product. At the end of the class, we had to create a presentation and present it in front of the class. I was in a real ‘Sex and the City’ phase, having borrowed and watched all seasons from a floor mate, so obviously I had to tie my love of the show into my marketing class. I don’t remember the exact basis of the presentation, but I somehow broke down each character and how everyone could pick a character they related to, which was part of the show's marketing strategy, along with the bold, brash concepts of women and sexuality. I most likely didn’t do any justice to the actual show's marketing team and strategy; I probably focused on the show's wardrobe more than anything. Again, I had no idea how big “marketing” would become in my life in the future. At this point in my life, I thought I was going to be a writer at a publishing house, which doesn't even make sense, but I digress.
Now that I have been in the field of marketing for over 17 years. In my 9-5 job, I have held positions at large, medium, and small-sized companies. I have touched everything in the broad field from social media, videography, writing, editing, financial planning, strategy and execution, managing, building a brand from scratch, logo design, storyline creation, website wire frames, brand color analysis, and jumping in as a small cog in a large wheel.
Outside my day job, I have helped, counseled, and supported family, friends, and acquaintances with their marketing strategies for a wide variety of businesses. From a personal training gym, custom wigs, HR consulting, to patent support services. I have supported the creation and launch of websites, designed logos, provided SEO consulting, written website content, and analyzed social media strategies.
I have been part of a wide variety of marketing tactics and strategies for services, software, and SaaS products in the B2B and B2C space. I am confident that I have broad experience in the field of marketing.
Over the course of my experience, I have heard the phrase “What does marketing even do?” more times than should ever be uttered in a work environment. Marketing is often labeled as easy and fun, and a nice-to-have, but definitely not a must. However, if it becomes a must, someone in-house can handle it on the side. Regardless of the company I have worked at, this is the general sentiment among non-marketers, especially from the sales team. Marketing is the shiny team where the folks who have a liberal arts degree post silly photos and videos on Instagram for likes and then call it a day.
As you can imagine, it is frustrating to have to constantly explain what it is that I do, why it’s valuable, and why a company of any size needs dedicated marketing.
What Marketing Isn’t!
Marketing isn’t taking a few selfie photos holding champagne flutes in a gorgeous meadow and posting them on Instagram with three hashtags, which somehow goes viral, and then saving the day of a failing family-owned champagne farm, like a modern show of an American girl in a European city likes to claim. (This show is so wildly inaccurate on what marketing is that I can’t be bothered to watch it.)
Marketing isn’t hosting monthly live Facebook videos with the only interactions of the video being coworkers.
Marketing isn’t attending a trade show, walking the floor, and collecting as much free swag as one can carry.
Marketing isn’t asking your visual designer to change the colors of an ad simply because “you don’t like them.”
Marketing isn’t posting once in a blue moon on an Instagram account.
Marketing isn’t spending thousands of dollars on an ad with no strategy other than wanting to be able to say that you have an ad.
Marketing isn’t sending one email to your entire database asking them to buy your product because the product does x,y, and z.
These examples are why marketing gets a bad reputation for being useless, inauthentic, and so easy that anyone can do it. Because, yes, anyone can perform the above activities and think they are performing “marketing.” The above examples I have seen performed firsthand, and they are performative actions; they are not true marketing tactics built upon a strategy to deliver measurable and effective results.
The marketing field is often employed with folks who like the idea of performative marketing, but don’t understand the necessary foundational concepts of building a marketing strategy with goals and KPIs. An Instagram photo, Facebook Live, Trade Show, and Billboard ad are all tactics that can absolutely be part of a marketing campaign, but as standalone activities, they aren’t really achieving much.
Why are we posting on Instagram? What photo are we posting? What captions are we using? When are we posting? Who are we posting it for? How do we know if the photo worked? If it works, what do we do next? If it doesn’t work, what's the next step? These are questions you need to be able to answer before you hit post on anything. Often, people cannot answer these questions and say they post on Instagram because other companies do it. Or “My boss told me to do it”. Leads are down, we need to go viral. Leads are down - tell marketing to do something.
Marketing is often tasked with being reactive to sales numbers, quotas, and leads. Instead, marketing should be built as a proactive long-term strategy, that is, an ever-running machine built to support and collaborate with the sales and other teams.
Which leads me to another frustrating misconception about marketing. Marketing is not a short-term fix. The C-Suite and sales leaders often blame marketing when funnels are low, and want a viral post immediately, or an email sent TODAY to drive leads NOW. This is not marketing. These are fear-based requests that are not sustainable and will not create the unrealistic results that marketing teams are often tasked with. When done correctly, marketing is a long-term, evolving machine that again supports and collaborates with the sales organization. Sales and marketing must have an open-door policy where data and findings are shared on a consistent and helpful basis.
There is a caveat: Marketing and sales can only ever be as good as the product or service itself. You cannot market yourself out of a bad product or bad customer service. You can for a little while, but eventually it will catch up to you.
So, What Is Marketing?
Marketing is the balanced mix of data, art, and behavioral psychology. In any marketing role, there is a lot of data. Looking at data, analyzing data, combining data sets, and reading through the numbers to find the story. Once you find the story in the data that needs to be told, art visualizes it, and psychology is how you connect with your audience. You want your desired audience to see your marketing but not look at it as a piece of marketing, but to feel something when they see it. You have to understand your audience, their wants, needs, what keeps them up at night, but you also have to understand why they want to be spoken to, where they spend their time, and what themes and messages will matter to them.
Marketing is taking these three vastly different ideologies and marrying them into a cohesive output. To be a marketer, you have to be able to read and understand data. You have to be able to tell a story through different types of art forms, and you have to understand the human connection. One cannot be a good marketer without these three different skill sets. And that’s why marketing is harder than most people understand. They only think that marketing is a type of fluffy artform. They only see the final output; they are missing the hours upon hours of analyzing data, empathizing with the human need to create a marketing output that will resonate, connect, and convert an unknown person into a lead in the funnel. To be a great marketer, you have to be able to perform all of this on a loop, while balancing working with a sales team so they understand why channels, tactics, and choices are being made. Managing budgets and reporting. The time spent manually building, designing, and testing landing pages, emails, forms, tracking URLs, downloadable assets, etc. All while trying to explain over and over what marketing even does.
Marketing + Gen AI
I can’t write a post about what marketing is or isn’t without mentioning Generative AI. Gen AI has exploded over the last year or so. Some people say that Gen AI will cut a lot of marketing jobs because AI can do exactly what a marketer does. I disagree completely. Gen AI absolutely makes my job easier; it can speed up my typical process, or it can spark an idea when I’m in a dry spell of ideas. What Gen AI cannot replace is thinking like a human. It cannot create unique art with soul. It cannot craft the story behind the numbers. Yes, Gen AI can review the data and highlight peaks and valleys, find trends much faster than I can manually. But Gen AI cannot take that information and parse out the story behind why the audience is behaving a certain way or what emotionally based story is needed to influence the desired behavior from the audience.
As a marketer, Gen AI will not replace me; it will make me faster, sharper, and speed up my overall production.
The use of AI was NOT used in the generation of this blog post. :)
