“Great marketing leads to more sales.”
Do you believe this?
In theory, I do. But in practice, it breaks.
We first need to grapple with what the hell marketing means. Call it semantics; I call it life or death.
If your team does not agree—subconsciously or consciously—with what marketing means, you will have a cluster f*ck of activity. Chaos could be a better way to describe it.
One person thinks marketing means sales. So, they hammer people through marketing to buy.
One person thinks marketing means branding. So, they focus on creating branded content and aim to increase their affinity with customers.
And the financial person thinks marketing means sporadically spending significant cash.
In the end, they all might be right. Except for those damn numbers (finance) people.
How would I describe marketing? In two ways:
- Increase pipeline to increase revenue
- Create—and grow—a compelling story
Marketing, in my eyes, is boiled down to those two things: Pipeline and story.
Do an effective lead gen tool (pipeline) and a compelling POV (story) increase sales? Most times. But if your product sucks, customer service is rancid, and your company is behind the industry curve, marketing can only help so much.
As I have said before, marketing is NOT a first-order principle.
Marketing Insights
Start with your marketing foundation. Do you have a clear target market? Do you understand the pain points you solve? Do you have a unique and compelling POV?
Once you build and refine your foundation, you can increase marketing or add more people to the team while seeing an actual increase in ROI.
If your foundation is shaky, more marketing or creating better marketing will do nothing to improve your results (sales).
Do you believe marketing is solely responsible for sales (revenue)?
Or should marketing focus on pipeline (leads) and sales be tied to revenue?
🧠 // JO