Truly Productive Marketing

Beware. Great marketing can kill your company.

Like any powerful tool, marketing can be applied in ways that do more harm than good, a threat that’s made all the more real by faulty assumptions about what marketing is…and isn’t. Marketing is one of the most misunderstood disciplines in all of business, which is probably one reason that so few companies master the process.

For a large percentage of people, marketing is, “that thing that the English majors do that’s supposed to help sales, but doesn’t.” It’s the process of maximizing exposures and optimizing search and creating a community and redefining the brand…an amorphous cauldron of jargon that seems to be only slightly short of witchcraft.

Quite frequently, business owners think of marketing as a necessary evil that they don’t quite understand and can’t measure, but they pay for it because they know it’s important. Or it’s supposed to be important, even if the CEO can’t exactly explain what the marketing plan is or how it gets done.

If we really want to use marketing for good, instead of evil, we need to be very clear about what we mean and what we do. Fundamentally…

Marketing is the process that creates our environment for success.

Success could be sales, recruitment, regulatory approval, retention or any number of goals. Whatever the goals are, a good marketing plan will grease the wheels of progress.

When it comes to sales, for example, marketing should make targets more likely to say yes before the sales rep makes the first contact. A good marketing plan builds recognition and respect for the company, making it more likely that the target will agree to an appointment and ultimately agree to a relationship. With HR, a good marketing plan attracts better applicants who will generate a higher return on our investment in them. With regulators, a good marketing plan builds our reputations as trustworthy organizations, tilting the scales just a bit in our favor on critical approvals. Et cetera.

All well and good, but let’s add another wrinkle to today’s topic. A well-designed and well-executed marketing plan can kill our companies.  A great plan can make us more successful at attracting the wrong customers, or the wrong employees, growing when we should be consolidating or adding non-strategic revenues. Great marketing can move us forward in a direction that we should not be moving at all. As that marketing succeeds, the business becomes less stable, less sustainable, more at risk.

What we really need isn’t just marketing, but truly productive marketing. Truly productive marketing creates an environment for success in a cost-effective and profitably targeted arena.

When we’re focused on sales support, for example, truly productive marketing increases the likelihood of success for the company’s most important value drivers. These will usually be the features/factors that differentiate the company in a positive way that appeals to the kind of customers the company wants to recruit and retain.

Truly productive marketing is designed to yield sustainable, profitable growth by emphasizing the core strengths that already exist within a company. Truly productive marketing identifies the core competitive differentiators that attract great clients and leverages those differentiators to attract more great clients. Equally important, truly productive marketing avoids initiatives that might draw unprofitable business that can actually weaken performance.

Such marketing is the exception and not the rule, though. Too often, we find business owners and operators who cannot explain their marketing plan, its goals, or how those goals match the company’s strategic emphasis. Without clarity, they fund a process that just might be doing more harm than good.

Is your company pursuing a truly productive marketing effort? Consider just a few diagnostic questions and then decide for yourself:

1. Which clients, services, competitive strengths are most responsible for our success today?
2. Which employees, vendors and other partners are most important in building the value of our organization?
3. How does our marketing program identify and cultivate more of these relationships?
4. Is our marketing program equally effective at attracting the relationships we want to avoid?

Marketing is a powerful tool for creating the environment for success. Let’s make sure, though, that we pursue a plan that builds our companies, rather than killing them.