Playing the Long Game: How Marketers Can Serve and Still Produce Revenue

Servant Marketer, the new podcast from Jenny Petty, is a must-listen. It explores the intersection of servant leadership and the marketing profession. I was elated to be interviewed on Episode 4 - Listening to Serve. Jenny asks thoughtful questions, like:

• What was your catalyst for studying leadership?
• What was the Jesuit and Franciscan education experience like, and how did it differ from public education?
• There's a lot of talk about service before sales, but few companies that walk the walk. Campus Sonar did this spring, with the Coronavirus Higher Education Industry Briefing. Where did the idea come from?
• What message would you send to marketing leaders right now?
• Marketing is often misunderstood in organizations. What can we do to help our organizations understand how we can better serve them?
• How has servant leadership changed the way you lead?
• How can leaders guide their organization through these "unprecedented times?"
• What can Taylor Swift teach us about marketing?

Playing the Long Game—The Question We Didn't Get To

As a great host, Jenny sent me questions in advance, and I prepared for them. Our conversation went so well, inviting follow-up questions, that we didn't get to all the questions she'd prepared. One, in particular, was so good I wanted to share it here.

Let's talk about the long game vs short game in marketing. How can marketers do a better job of serving and still produce revenue?

My answer:

Marketing is about attracting attention and matching solutions to problems. There are a lot of different ways to do that, although some companies default right to the “you should buy our stuff” message.

Playing the long game means you trust your customers to come to that conclusion on their own by helping them, gaining their trust, and demonstrating the value of your product or service in the right place at the right time.

The Campus Sonar marketing team (while mighty, just three people) has defined their mission as:

to have—and show— relentless empathy for our audiences.

They’ve further defined what that looks like, and I think this list represents how we play the long game.

• Identify, analyze, and promote ongoing understanding of our key personas (we have four).
• Publish relevant content to help those personas, on our site as well as external sites our audiences frequent.
• Provide website experiences that educate our audiences about social listening and prove how it can fulfill their campus needs.
• Engage with our audiences on key marketing channels.
• Anticipate curiosities and questions, and proactively act to answer them.
• Pursue ongoing individual and team development to advance our skills to continually improve our ability to fulfill these goals.

Playing the long game requires buy-in from leadership. At Campus Sonar that means the marketing team not only needs my support, but also the support of our parent company that funds the business in its early stages.

When I started the business, I told our investor I would need to spend two to three years on education (i.e., marketing as service) before our target audience was ready to purchase in any meaningful way. We invested in over 100 well-crafted, helpful blog posts (from our team and guests), three original free research reports, nearly 100 conference presentations, webinars, and podcast interviews, a monthly newsletter, and a book (and soon a second book). I was absolutely right about the timeline.

Our 3-year anniversary is October 2020. We’ve had clients during these first three years, but they were all early-adopter types. We’re just now starting to have business conversations with the people we anticipated needing 2-3 years of education and trust-building—but when we do, they’re ready to buy because marketing has done its job. In the first 8 months of this year (during a pandemic) we've sold more services than the last two years combined.

We extend the marketing approach into our sales strategy. When our business development team talks to prospective clients, they often feel like we’re providing a consultation, rather than a sales pitch. That's a better experience for the client, and my team members. (If you want to learn more about how our services support campus-wide growth, brand research and analysis, and audience engagement, the team would be happy to speak with you.)

Further, when long-game, marketing-as-service is done really well, the marketing itself can become a revenue-generating product. Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose describe this in Killing Marketing, which I haven’t read but a few team members have. Campus Sonar is about to put this into practice, and our marketing team couldn't be more excited. Stay tuned this fall to learn more.

For this to work, you need a goal, a plan, and leadership buy-in with a time horizon of years, not weeks or months. Three to five years is a realistic expectation. We were able to push it to 2-3 years because we focused on a small niche in an industry I and my teammates had already worked in for a decade or more. We started our brand trust building with a foot in the door from relationships we'd been building one by one for years. You also need to be willing to deviate from the traditional model of marketing and sales. Quota-based, cold-calling growth strategies are not compatible with marketing as a service. Relentless email blasts aren't either. Your team and investors must be prepared for delayed gratification.

When it works, you customers thank you for your marketing. Seriously. And I plan to prove the long game also results in a sustainable, profitable business where customers, prospects, and employees are invested in its success.

The Campus Sonar marketing team is led by Bri Krantz, Marketing Manager and supported by Michelle Mulder, Content Strategist and Gillian Drier, Graphic Designer. They each deserve a major shout out for all our marketing strategy and activities.