Why Marketing is More than Just Marketing

While marketing strategies and specific tactics are plentiful, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in founding and growing a successful marketing agency, it’s that the true power of marketing is unlocked when organizations take a step back from the nitty gritty details and start to view marketing as more than just marketing.

You may be wondering, “What do you mean, marketing is more than just marketing?” The answer is simple.?

While marketing efforts can span different channels, deliverables, and audiences, the power of marketing doesn’t stop there. Real, effective marketing has the potential to impact more than just brand reputation and lead generation — it can also be strategically leveraged to enhance HR, sales efficacy, and customer success.?

That’s how marketing is more than just marketing.

Marketing and HR

At first glance, Marketing and HR may not seem like natural partners. However, when these two departments work together, organizations can reap substantial benefits, such as talent acquisition, refined onboarding processes, and more effective internal communications.?

Talent Acquisition?

In a crowded marketplace, marketing helps organizations differentiate themselves. Market differentiation is critical for talent acquisition efforts, especially when talent pools are limited. By collaborating with marketing, HR departments can make job postings more appealing and effective, enabling the organization to stand out from the crowd and attract new talent.

Onboarding Processes

Marketing helps brands leave a lasting impression — and when HR is responsible for creating employees’ first impressions during onboarding, there’s a natural synergy between these departments. Marketing can help HR elevate their onboarding efforts to achieve a more memorable and enjoyable experience for new employees.

Internal Communications

A critical aspect of successful marketing is developing clear and compelling messaging. Without a thoughtful and consistent message, brands risk sending mixed signals to customers. The same holds true for HR departments, which are responsible for various internal communications. By working together, marketing can help HR departments clarify their communications to achieve the most effective impact.

Marketing and Sales

Marketing and sales departments are the ultimate power couple. That’s because when they work together, marketing can help sales departments create and nurture leads, drive conversions, and generate higher revenue.?

Demand Generation

Marketing tactics increase brand awareness and product visibility to a wide range of qualified target markets, which improves demand generation — and, ultimately, revenue. In fact, by creating a comprehensive and nimble geo-targeted advertising strategy for a SaaS organization, our team drove demand and collaborated with the organization's sales team to generate $3.7 million in revenue from new customers. Better leads and more revenue — that’s the power of marketing and sales collaboration.

Sales Enablement

Sales enablement is another natural benefit of better marketing and sales collaboration. By working together, marketing and sales departments can clearly define MQLs/SQLs and clarify handoffs, leading to a more seamless customer journey. Additionally, sales teams can help inform marketing messages, and marketing can provide sales teams with the materials they need to close a deal. Simply put, by having a two-way flow of collaboration, organizations can enable sales departments and reap the benefits of higher win rates.

Marketing and Customer Success

Marketing and customer success is another underestimated collaboration, but the results can be quite effective. Customer success is often a direct line of insight into target audiences, so when marketing and customer success work together, organizations can reap some significant benefits.

Product and Service Insights

By working together, marketing and customer success get on the same page about product and service insights. Marketing can help customer success effectively communicate new feature releases, service enhancements, and other updates, while customer success can help marketers understand which products and services are resonating best with customers. This cyclical process refines a brand’s value propositions and helps create highly effective customer touchpoints.

Customer Satisfaction and Lifetime Value

Collaboration between marketing and customer success enables opportunities for seamless customer support and increased brand loyalty. In fact, for one of our clients, we helped align their marketing, sales, and customer success departments, resulting in a 146% increase in brand sentiment and brand perception quarter over quarter. Satisfied customers, and particularly those with an outlet to share their experiences, are an enormous marketing asset and potential revenue generator. That’s a key reason why alignment between marketing and customer success is so critical.?

Marketing Wears Many Hats

At the end of the day, marketing wears many hats. It lives in print ads, social media, commercials, and events, and it connects with audiences all over the world. That being said, no matter how versatile marketing campaigns are, they won’t live up to their full potential unless organizations understand the power of marketing beyond the walls of the marketing department.?

Marketing is more than just marketing. Start leveraging it to achieve widespread results across your entire organization.