The Secret of Truly Successful Marketing

Everybody knows what marketing is. Right?

Well, maybe not.

What many companies equate with marketing is actually marketing communications. Or promotion—one of the foundational 4 Ps in the marketing mix together with Product, Price, and Place.

Some consider marketing to be a process whereby your goal is to package and present your product in the most irresistible fashion in order to convince your target audience to open their wallets and buy it.

Others may think that marketing is about establishing the best distribution channels for your product or service—both offline and online—so that you'll improve the chances of your product brands gaining maximum awareness and visibility.

This same philosophy also applies to online advertising, which some think digital marketing is all about. In the field of "performance marketing," your goal is to improve the yield of your digital marketing processes—from the way your Google Ads are written and designed, your landing pages are optimized for conversion, to how your email sequences are tailored. Every step of the marketing sequence is measured and analysed to determine how each content piece in your campaign is crafted to maximise ROI.

But is this truly what marketing is all about?

Revisiting Marketing's Definition

According to the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) in the UK, marketing can be defined as...

“Marketing: The management process which identifies, anticipates, and supplies customer requirements efficiently and profitably”

What about the Americans? Well, the American Marketing Association (AMA) defines marketing as follows:

"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"

Notice in both the definitions above that marketing isn't in selling, promoting or advertising a company's product or service. Rather, the core of marketing is in supplying "customer requirements" or providing "value" to your customers (and other stakeholders).

In other words, marketing's true North isn't in the company or the products or even its brands. Rather, the marketing compass should point towards your potential customer.

Against this backdrop, it is useful to relook at how you conduct the different activities associated with marketing. To make it easy for you to remember, I'll sequence these strategies from A to F.

From Attention to Activation

Yes, we're living in an attention-deficit age. You can't afford to create an average looking piece of content and hope to stand out in an overwhelmingly cluttered content landscape.

But think beyond attention to activation. Consider how your marketing moves beyond just catching your audience's eyeballs to making them change the way they think, act or feel about themselves. Make your marketing a clarion call that galvanises your customer to positive action.

From Branding to Being

Next, let us look at branding.

By now, you ought to know that branding is a lot more than just your organisation's logo (or product logo), packaging, design, colours, or advertising templates. Your brand should also be a lot more than just a fancy tagline or slogan.

In fact, the aesthetics of a brand is just one dimension to what your brand is. The best brands don't just focus on how they look—rather, they focus on how they make their customers feel.

I'd like to take this further. The best brands don't just leave a positive impression on their customers—they make their customers feel better about themselves. In other words, your product now becomes an essential part of your customer's lives.

From Campaigns to Conversations

The other way to think about marketing is to shift away from the age-old "campaigns" mindset.

While there is a time and place for big ideas and fancy schmancy advertisements that blows the mind (and the wallet), successful marketers focus on their customer conversations.

They make it a point to keep their antenna up to listen to what their prospects are telling them—their life (or work) problems, their frustrations, their failures, as well as their guilty pleasures, their ambitions, and their dreams.

By doing so, you'll be able to forge a genuine connection with your customers.

From Deals to Direction

Irresistible deals. Fire sales. Never-to-be-repeated-offers.

Discounts and promotions are the bread-and-butter tools of marketers both offline and online. While they do help to drive a temporary spike in sales, these marketing gimmicks can never sustain a business over the long-haul.

In place of price-linked incentives, why not offer your customers direction instead? Provide them with a sense of purpose that goes beyond a transaction. Nudge them to move towards a better and brighter future—one where your company can play a role in.

From Entertainment to Education

I've got nothing against producing videos that are humourous and share-worthy. Such content is useful in breaking the online clutter.

However, if you truly want to forge a deeper connection with your customers, you need to help them to do better in their lives or at work. Be helpful and answer their specific needs. Provide valuable content that helps them to improve. Guide them to the best strategies and tactics they can use to lead a better life (or perform well at work).

From Features To Fellowships

Finally, consider how your marketing strategies can focus less on your product features and benefits, and more on creating a fellowship of like-minded persons.

This community of folks may have similar interests, and are seeking to learn and grow in their knowledge and expertise in a specific area. They would enjoy learning from one another, or from you.

Beyond building a community, consider how you can forge friendships with your stakeholders. Go beyond just online engagements to offline interactions. Know them and meet them face-to-face.

Conclusion

The secret of great marketing isn't found in creating the perfect product, launching the most remarkable campaign, or offering the greatest value-for-money deal.

Rather, it lies in deeply understanding your customers, encouraging them to take positive action, connecting with them, helping them to do better, and befriending them.

In short, it isn't really a secret, but a radical way of changing how you think: away from your company and its brands, towards your customers and their concerns.