The Many Faces of Marketing: It's Not Just About Sales

When I ask people about how they are marketing their business, I often get an immediate response that they, "don't want to sound salesy!" The second thing I notice is that founders and SMBs decide that marketing is something that happens after launch. "We have a great product, now we just need to market it."

I've come to believe that marketing's role is far more diverse and starts much earlier in the product lifecycle than many people think.

Let me break it down for you:

1. Before Ideation: Spotting Market Gaps

Marketing isn't just about promoting existing products. Sometimes, it's about identifying opportunities before a product even exists. We marketers are often the ones who spot gaps in the market and say, "Hey, there's a need here that nobody's addressing." This insight can spark the creation of entirely new products or services.

Research shows that 57% of the buying process is completed before a customer even or a "buy now" button. More than half the time, your potential users, players, and customers will have made up their mind before the song and dance even starts.

That decision may be due to product-market fit or, put a better way, product-buyer fit. A gap in the market is not necessarily a need in the market. A gap in the market might also not be a desire in the market. Remember when video games were all going to make a fortune selling NFT in-game items? There was a gap in the market and sure, it could be seen as a reasonable product-market fit but the overwhelming number of players (and even game makers) were not a good fit.

In this phase, marketing is reconnaissance.

2. During Ideation: Shaping the Product

Once an idea is born, marketing should play a crucial role in shaping it. We're not just thinking about how to sell it, but how to position it. What features should we highlight? What pain points does it address? How does it fit into the market landscape? This early involvement ensures that the product is built with the customer in mind from the get-go.

As Seth Godin famously said, "Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell." Remember, more than half of buyers have mostly made up their minds before the "conversion."

In this phase, marketing is a storyteller.

3. Go-To-Market: Empowering Sales

This is where marketing and sales start to overlap, and it's probably the stage most people associate with marketing. We're creating messaging, developing collateral, and arming the sales team with the tools they need to succeed. Where there is no "sales team" per se, marketing is creating a process that motivates the right customer to click, download, and purchase.

But remember, this is just one phase of marketing's involvement.

The importance of this alignment can't be overstated. Companies with strong sales and marketing alignment achieve 20% annual revenue growth on average, compared to a 4% decline for companies with poor alignment. So what about companies where there is no live sales people? This is where marketing has to be truly "data-driven." We all have great anecdotes about that weird campaign that shouldn't have worked but did because "we trusted our gut" and "went with the creative choice." That's a lack of alignment between the marketing and sales function. Yes, it's great to build brand awareness and energize our core customers but, at the end of every day, revenue, revenue, revenue is what makes companies succeed.

In this phase, marketing is a mathematician. If we spend X putting on our little medicine show, we must bring in Y to make it work.

4. Post-Launch: Continuous Improvement or Total Reassessment

Unfortunately, companies often skip over marketing during phases one and two so by the time they land here, the hard truths are even harder. No amount of "marketing" will save a product or service that didn't fully understand their market landscape. The top problems I see are:

• Flatlining community growth and user adoption. Early adopters will say this is due to a "lack of marketing" but it's really due to a lack of product-buyer fit.
• Revenue never catches up to expenses. Yes, your idea was awesome but you mis-sized the market.There just aren't enough people who want to buy your widget at a price that make sense. Yes, you have a loyal community (see above) but if you're not growing, you're going to end up cutting.
• Unwillingness to pivot. Sometimes products are in the right position but they aren't quite the right product. For instance, YouTube started as a video-dating site. PayPal famously pivoted five times before landing in their sweet spot. Changing your mission or even your vision is not the same as compromising your values. To quote the song, know when to hold 'em. Know when to fold 'em. Know when to walk away. Know when to run.
• Ambivalence. This is an often misunderstood word that people misuse to indicate indifference. Its true meaning is close to two equally strong ideas pulling you in opposite directions. Too often, this leads to weak decisions or worse, no decisions. I previously worked at a large company where the marketing mantra was "acquire new players but don't alienate existing ones." To quote Marshall Goldsmith, "What got you here won't get you there." While you don't want to burn loyal customers willy nilly, sometimes you will have to make hard decisions about a product's future.

In this phase, marketing is a coach.

Comparing and Contrasting

In practice, marketing involves activities like market research, branding, advertising, and content creation to attract and engage a profitable audience. Effective marketing creates opportunities for sales, while feedback from sales can inform marketing strategies. The most successful businesses integrate both functions seamlessly to create a cohesive customer journey from initial awareness to final purchase.

So next time you think about marketing, remember: we're best able to help when we are involved in every stage of the product journey, from identifying opportunities to continuously improving the product and its market position.