What Does Marketing Do?

When I speak with business owners and ask them to tell me about their marketing, sometimes I get a list of activities, the things that they’re doing. The challenge with that is, by itself, it doesn’t really tell me what their marketing is and how it works.

Our opportunity
A more productive conversation starts with, here’s what we do, here’s what we’re really good at, and we’re really good at this for this group of prospects, here’s what they’re like. Might be a conversation about how many of them there are and how valuable that thing is that they make. But that product market fit is the beginning of the conversation because the two magnets that are being attracted to each other in, in marketing, in a business. That’s the beginning. That’s what’s the source of the opportunity for marketing in any business. 

How marketing can help
From that, the next thing you need to know to explain how marketing’s working is what it is marketing can do or can’t do to make that connection happen. Because for every business, it’s different. You can’t take a standard set of marketing approaches and apply it to every business, and have it be just as effective. The nuances of your industry, your prospect, your business, your capabilities, your competitors, all those things affect how you get your prospects to see you and to respond to you and to be eager to work with you. So it’s really important to look at, of all the possible ways that marketing might help, here are the ones that have the most opportunity to help us in our business make that connection between product and market.

What marketing does
And then that background, it makes sense to say because of that, we are doing this and this, and this. We are choosing to focus our tactics, our precious investment in marketing tactics, on these two or three things. That is a conversation that is very complete and informative about how your marketing works.