Why Do Companies View Marketing as Magic?

A Discussion on the Channels and Tech in Modern Marketing 

Some of the common phrases that I hear about marketing are "it's just marketing, right?" or "we'll give you all the information, and you can do your marketing magic." What's interesting about both of those phrases is that while marketing as a profession has changed in the last ten years and continues to evolve at a rapid pace - when it comes to how companies view marketing, very little has changed.

We deal directly with Professional Services such as legal, healthcare, and wealth advisors, and we see a few common themes in how they build their marketing teams - which in turn may lead them to see marketing as magic or an effortless task.

The first and probably the most common theme that could extend outside these industries is the view that a marketing manager is expected to be the master of every marketing channel. For example, many teams hire a manager and ask them to do content development, social media, video production, SEO, and email marketing. They also need to be creative enough to design the graphics and technically proficient in web development. Those are all different jobs with average annual salaries of $68,000, so about $500,000 yearly to source a full team. But they're likely paying one person about $85,000 - because it's just marketing, right? And they can figure it out with some marketing magic.

The other common themes we see are marketing by committee or decentralized marketing. In each of these cases, there isn't one person responsible for marketing. Either the committee comprises several stakeholders throughout the company (usually operations and sales) and is responsible for ultimate decision-making, or each Business Unit (BU) runs its own marketing projects. In both cases, each relies heavily on vendors or agencies. The committee or BUs put together their list of wants, and voila! The vendors do their marketing magic.

Now, there are definitely pros and cons to each of these. And my goal is not to discuss all of them. That would be a case study that we would put on a landing page to have it downloaded by a bunch of other agencies, which is an entirely different blog post.

What I’d like to review is how in those environments, you can learn to really appreciate what you're asking from your marketing team and, hopefully, understand marketing isn't some magic wand to wave but something that is a complex series of tasks, research, and understanding of not just technology but of human behavior. Yes, I want you to love your marketing.

Recognize that not all marketing channels are the same.

It's not just your website anymore. It's email, paid ads, videos, webinars, and social. And even within each channel, there are several more sub-channels. Social is the most straightforward example because we're all familiar with it at this point - there's TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. Oh, and what about BeReal and anyone remember Clubhouse? Of course, we still have traditional marketing channels like TV ads and events. At this point, there are so many channels, which frustrates the team because they ask their marketing to dominate in each.

So how can you lower that frustration and heighten the happiness level? Realize that marketing channels are different and should be treated differently in your marketing strategy. Pick one that you think resonates the best with your demographic. Get comfortable in that channel, then go to the next one. Sure, this isn't a high hack growth strategy - this is a very strategic, thoughtful way of ensuring your messaging gets to the right people. And more importantly, it's allowing your marketing teams to really succeed at each level before it moves on to the next channel. Yes, it's how you and your customers could actually love your marketing, one channel at a time.

Now, this isn't to say you can't produce content on multiple channels. You can certainly repurpose the content from one medium across others. In that strategy, you're not necessarily creating content for each one of those channels (they really should be produced differently), but you're at least able to test out different messaging or types of branding that might resonate. That can give you essential data and a starting point for diving into the next channel.

Know that tech is real in marketing, and it is constantly changing.

I'm willing to bet that most marketers spend much more of their time dealing with and understanding the technology of which their content will be produced than actually writing the content. Let's take email. It's my favorite because an email campaign is a seemingly simple task. You gather the information, put together the content and push a button to send it out. It's magic, right?

Let me give you a real example of a customer whose BU ask us to put together an email to promote their new product for legal firms. We worked with their sales team, product vendor, and internal marketing creative. Even before we got to the actual email content management system, we navigated between seven different technologies - between cloud drives, separate email clients, chat systems, and multiple creative suites. And even when it came to the email delivery system itself, we had to navigate into various systems - one for the marketing team that had their audience in one system, the sales team that had their contacts in a different system, and the third for contract vendors that wanted to send in their own system.

What might be the obvious answer to this situation is only to use one or two collaboration techs or consolidate the email systems into one. The reality is that it's likely not something that happens easily enough in companies, so marketing operates in the process we have to. For this, proper planning helps tremendously, and the acknowledgment from stakeholders that the tech will not always work the same across all devices platforms.

Give your teams enough time to build the campaigns. Don't give them three days to develop a campaign - give the team three months. Trust me, everybody would love that. The second is knowing you will never have a seemingly perfect outcome. Your marketing content will look different on your machine because you will use a different resolution, a different device than the other team members. And it will look different to your customers depending on how they interact (phone, laptop, TV, VR, brochures). It's all different, so you do your best to work through the tech. It's not magic. It's real marketing humans who are learning all the different ways to deliver your message. And just when they figure it out - the tech changes.

Ok, so loving your marketing is probably a little far-fetched. Hopefully, you’ve gained a better sense of the amount of work that goes into producing quality marketing and that it doesn’t rely on magic (or rainbows or unicorns for that matter). It’s a pretty awesome part of your business if you have the right view.