The next time someone tells you about something that's going to make marketing "easy," do yourself a favor and run as fast as you can the other direction.
There are a lot of words one can apply to these professions (and I've applied some very flowery words and some four-letter words to them over the past two decades). Easy is not one of them.
And yet, we live in a time right now where business owners and leaders are being told that they can take all of the work out of their marketing and communications efforts and still get the same results. You can see why the concept is so tempting. Nearly every organization today is being forced to work harder to bring in every dollar, and cutting back on expenses is, on the surface, a smart way to squeeze out a little bit more revenue.
This concept of making it easier is, unfortunately for businesses who are making these decisions, fundamentally flawed. Cutting back on marketing in general, eliminating headcount in favor of systems and automation, replacing content experts with AI; all are making the assumption that marketing is only a numbers game. More leads = more conversions = more money. Anyone who has ever worked in a corporate marketing role (or corporate finance role, for that matter) knows that the equation almost never works like that.
Because the truth is that marketing success is about creating relationships and building genuine trust. And doing that requires:
A deep understanding of and empathy for the people who want or need to buy a product
An understanding of the business problem a product is trying to solve
an understanding of how each solution provides the perfect counter to a real pain point
An understanding of what is relevant to a target customer at an individual level; what they truly care about
The ability to make an emotional connection that lives above any list of features or benefits
Read those again. Does any of that sound easy? Sorry, Gen AI doesn’t make any of it easy. If anything, all that noise is making things harder for marketers and communicators to focus on what they should be focused on.
Getting a shiny new system or tool doesn’t make it easy. Especially if the product fit, the differentiated narrative and the why story aren't there, more tools won't save you. That's not to say that there aren't great tools out there. In my experience, I've never onboarded one where the marketing team could sit back and say, "Ah, yes, finally our jobs are easy."
Hiring more staff won’t make it easy. Calling it demand gen and ABX doesn’t make it any easy. Using a "proven playbook" doesn't make it easy. I'm harping on this because, every year, there are more new systems and playbooks and platforms and buzz terms for marketers to deal with. More needless complexity.
You can see why we do it to ourselves; marketing is always the scapegoat when the problems start, and the first area that has to rationalize its existence to decision makers. So the more advanced it seems, then the higher the perceived value, right?
Except that’s never how it plays out in the real world. In practice, the proliferation of tools, systems and hyper-specialization leads to bloated marketing teams, narrow silos within the marketing department and, most damaging of all, even more confusion across the organization as to what marketing actually does.
So no, any marketing that's worth doing isn't going to be easy. Great marketing is, however, almost always simple. To be great, we must learn how to tell the difference between simple and easy.
In the context of marketing, the most important definition of simple is "easily understood." In general, what I've found outside of the usual echo chambers is that most people don't actually understand what marketing is. If you're one of those people, here's my basic definition:
Marketing is finding product-market fit, building a story around the solution that shows your target market they want or need it, consistently delivering those messages where your market spends their time and expects to see it, making it easy to understand what you deliver and what it costs, selling it and providing an experience that shows you care about the customer.
How about the 10,000 metrics that we're always furiously tracking to denote marketing success? Getting that granular probably tells us something as marketers, but it often tells a business very little. At the end of the day, marketing either helps you sell or it doesn’t - brand, content, capture, events - it’s all meant to help you generate and keep business.
As it relates to finding and earning new customers, I look at marketing as contributing to three distinct steps: crafting your story, building your presence and selling your solution. If you cut everything else away, all marketing and sales for a business for new customers falls into one of those categories.
Using those three steps as your simple framework, you can set specific goals for each phase. In the best-case scenario, these goals should represent both what you want to happen in your marketing and campaigns themselves (e.g., views, visits, engagements) and the business goals that each stage will impact (e.g., converting leads to closed business, retention rate, revenue). Setting simple goals will also help you identify which marketing elements you should be focused on under each step (and which to avoid, at least at first).
Could you make every item in the graphic above a lot more complex? Sure you could. And a lot of marketers do. Here's the thing, though. What you see in the graphic is simple, yet it is incredibly difficult to master. If it was easy, every business would have already done it.
Marketing is hard precisely because it is simple. You've likely heard the saying that it's harder to write a one sentence tagline than a 10-page document. It's true in that instance and true of marketing in general.
In my experience, the majority of businesses have not spent enough time and effort on building these foundations. Some are even spending hard-earned dollars on advertising and with SEO vendors to churn out a huge volume of blog content. It's a waste of money, at least until you have the basics - your story, your messaging, your presence, your pitch - down pat.
Most businesses would be better off spending time and money on doing the basics incredibly well. The more everything else changes, the more these foundations stay the same, and the more important they become.
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