MARKETING VS. BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT: WHAT IS BEST?
When comparing marketing vs. business development, first understand there is a synergy between the two. Both marketing and business development use skills and knowledge to help the business grow. But what exactly are the differences between them??Each uses a very different approach on capturing business, despite the fact they both work to generate new leads, build strategic relationships, and improve the process of winning new customers.
Let’s start with the basics of defining marketing, then business development, then discuss the synergies between the two.
What is Marketing?
I’m not sure you could find a more “official” definition of marketing than from the?American Marketing Association.??“Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”?That’s a bit abstract for me, so let me break it down for you.?Or if you’re a Millennial, let me “unpack” this for you:
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Types of marketing include
Example channels
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Ethnographies, personas and customer segmentation
Often, customer-centric marketing starts with the process of taking ethnographies.?Ethnographies are used to create personas. Most?personas?include common stats like income, age, race, sex and geographic location.?I’ve found customer segmentation built around race / age / sex stereotypes ends up being useless.?I’m not a big fan of using a lot of inductive reasoning to make decisions with money.?Let’s use deductive reasoning.?With enough customer data, your marketing department will create cluster groups around pain points, usage trends, decision making authority and anything else that might be helpful.?If that happens to include age or income, great, but let’s not assume.?If you want to understand how your marketing team can use customer segmentation to grow your business,?this article is by Rahul Vohra, the founder and CEO of Superhuman, is probably the best article I’ve ever read.
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Customer journeys and funnels
Marketing always starts with the customer.?They seek to understanding the customer experience and the customer journey from A-to-Z.?They’re looking for the best content and messaging to move the process along the sales funnel from Awareness to Interest to Desire to Action (AIDA).??
Some (like HubSpot) feel it’s a bit more haute couture to use the term flywheel instead of funnel.?The idea is that the customer should be central to everything you do.?I think making this distinction takes the implications of a diagram too literally.?You can still use a funnel diagram and keep your customer’s needs central to everything you do.?That said, here is the flywheel:
I like the idea of merging the two concepts into a “Fircle.”?Funnel + Circle = Fircle.?It’s visually unappealing, but it better explains a key point I feel the funnel and flywheel are missing.?Once trust is established, your goal is to continue to Engage and Delight.?The Awareness and Interest phase don’t have to be repeated and your brand advocates use Word of Mouth (WOM) to help others enter the funnel already at the Engage stage.?
Highlighting your value proposition
Ultimately, marketing is trying to identify and connect with those who most desperately need your product. Who has the highest pain point? What is the content most relevant to them??What are your unique selling points???What is the customer experience and how can we delight customers? Marketing departments develop your brand strategy, outline your positioning statement and write your value proposition.?They will explain to the world your?“Why” as defined by Simon Sinek.
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The four Ps of marketing
When putting together a marketing strategy, many people look to the four Ps of marketing.?I think it’s interesting to compare this to a more holistic view like?Business Model Canvas.
?1) Product
This is your product as defined by its attributes, meaning features, benefits, functions and uses. Benefits and features may be defined both as tangible and intangible, especially if your product is a service.
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?2) Price
Obviously, this is what you can charge for your goods or services or the amount of money customers must pay to acquire your product. This is the market assigning a value to our solution.
?3) Place
This has to do with distribution channels. What is your market coverage and how do you get your product to your customers?
?4) Promotion
According to the American Marketing Association, promotions are measurable short-term projects that may include rebates, special packaging, licensing and coupons.?You are trying to influence in a measurable way purchase volume and profit.
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The marketing challenge
Part of the problem is that the messaging that needs to be used is different for different customer segments.?Then it needs to be different depending upon where they enter the funnel.?Which message works best on which channel for which customer segment that enters the funnel HERE??This is why you’ll hear your marketing team talking about ToFu, MoFu and BoFu for Top of Funnel, Middle of Funnel and Bottom of Funnel strategy. And it constantly changes.?The marketing department is going to split test and use analytics and data to measure the results and make adjustments accordingly.
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Data and analytics
One of the critical roles of marketing analysis is determining how effective your marketing campaigns are at building connections and driving conversions. Each marketing strategy should include various?marketing KPIs?to track your results. These include:
The goal is to track how different parts of your target market respond to your communication at different part of the funnel. Small percentage conversion improvements for each step multiply each other, creating big results.?The bottom line is a brand that satisfies the needs of customers by delivering value. That’s what will bring more sales and profits.
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Content marketing
Ah, content marketing.?“Content Is King.”?No article explaining marketing today would be complete without a section on our most popular buzzword: content marketing.?
?While this type of marketing is not new, historically marketing has been about push distribution of messaging towards potential customers. With the rise of the Internet, customers gained more control over what information they decided to see and when they wanted to see it. Suddenly marketing became about being in the space where the audience was already located and creating engagement there.?Increasingly, marketers realized customers were going to have to come to them. The key to success was to entice customers with relevant, helpful, and interesting content, not bashing them over the head with “buy my stuff.”?
?We’ve entered the age of?the attention economy.?Consequently, a lot of content has become more of a soft sell, a lifestyle sell, or even a no sell, just to provide useful info and position yourself as an industry leader.?I’ve got quite a few years of research on the best ratios between edutainment and “ask for the sale” content, but that’s for another post.?
?According to?Dan Weingrod, the Senior Director Customer Experience Strategy at Travelers (and ex-Professor of Digital and Social Media at Hult International Business School / Cambridge, MA), “Content marketing is content in all format and media that is helpful or interesting to customers while supporting our value proposition and positioning.?It’s about relevant information to customers, our personas, that generally does not try to sell you on the product but instead attracts you by being interesting, timely, informative and sometimes humorous.”
?The good news is that customers often hang out in forums and on social media platforms, where presence can (sometimes) be free.?In the case of blog posts optimized for SEO, the content would be on owned media, so businesses don’t have to pay placement costs.
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What is Business Development?
For many people the term “business development” is a bit nebulous.?This article in Forbes?tends to agree.?Some feel it’s just a fancy word for sales.?We spoke with?Paul Van den Brande, who runs a 406,000+ sized group on LinkedIn called?Business Development – The Missing Link Between Marketing And Sales.?According to Paul, “Business Development is the process of continuously boosting communication, PR, sales and marketing to be & remain successful in the selected (new) markets. Business Development thus includes parts of all the above functions.” Paul was nice enough to include a link to his?free PDF on Business Development pictured below.
That brings me to Investopedia’s broad and sweeping view of?business development.?While they painted the topic of business development with a broad brush, we chose to frame most of the information from that point of view. Please bear in mind that since “business development” definitions are somewhat subjective, your mileage may vary.