Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department
I love this quote…
I really believe that it’s hugely important to integrate marketing into almost every part of your business…
It’s not just sales and advertising
And I personally think there’s a big difference between ‘marketing’ and ‘sales and advertising’. There are certainly crossovers, but so many people associate ‘marketing’ with telesales calls that interrupt your evening. Just about every taxi driver comes to this conclusion if they ask me what I do… maybe I look like a spammer!Seth
While I was thinking about this quote, I stumbled upon a video by Seth Godin from a Software conference in 2008, Seth is the author of best selling marketing books ‘The Dip’, ‘Permission Marketing’ and ‘Purple Cow’, among others.
The title of the video echoes the quote, but the video covers a huge amount. It’s about an hour long, but well worth watching. He uses examples of companies that punch above their weight by integrating marketing into the development of products/services and delivery of business processes (whether this was by design or it just came naturally). Seth gets into this at about 20 minutes in.
Product development
Marketing is often used just to sell products ‘when they’re ready’, but should be used to help design your brand, products and services. By researching the potential target audience, you may find out that you’re targeting the wrong people, or there’s a different use for your product. This can prevent you wasting a lot of time and money perfectly executing a plan that, in the end, has no sustainable revenue stream.
Your audience might answer your open questions with responses that you’d never thought about, or ask you questions that take you down a completely different route.
Website
And exactly the same applies to the development of a website… It’s normal to see projects after the web development is completed and the new website launched. Marketing for the site is often only considered when it becomes clear that visitors and sales don’t appear when you hit the ‘go live’ button.
The tools used to market a website will differ from case to case, depending on the industry, product/service, budgets and objectives, but typical channels would include things like social media, Pay per Click marketing (sponsored search engine results), and Search Engine Optimisation.
By only considering these things after the website is built, you may need to go back to your web developer to ask for changes.
For example:
Maile Ohye, Developer programs tech lead at Google explains how SEO should be integrated in her video “5 common mistakes in SEO (and 6 good ideas)”. Again, the video covers much more than the topic here, and if you’re getting in SEO, is worth watching to till the end.
Sales
And back to those annoying telesales calls… well there are companies who do tremendously well by throwing enough mud at the wall.
A detached sales team that systematically runs through a bought list of phone numbers, may generate fantastic volumes of sales. Money is one thing…
But if you could integrate marketing into the selection, delivery and follow up, while it may be more time consuming and costly, you have a better chance of maintaining a good reputation, long term customers and referrals.
Some examples:
Customer service
It’s painful to see companies that spend fortunes on wonderful marketing and advertising campaigns, but don’t have the stock, or are represented by customer service staff who either don’t know about the product or offer, or don’t seem to care. Making sure that marketing, logistics and customer support all speak to each other can help prevent this wasteful situation.
And whilst social media is often used as another method to broadcast brand messages and sales promotions, certain companies have used it incredible well to deal with customer queries and complaints.
Amex have a Twitter account devoted to just that, and you can see here as their ‘branding’ account responds in a friendly way, and points this customer in the direction of the ‘customer service’ account.
This was from Kiss Metric’s article “10 Ways to Make Customers Fall in Love with Your Business“.
In a 2011 study by Maritz and Evolve24, they discovered that of the people surveyed who had made a complaint via Twitter, only 29% received a response. But interestingly, of those people who did receive a response, 83% said that they “loved” or “liked” receiving a response.
Bearing in mind their initial contact was to complain.
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