If it ain’t systematic, it ain’t marketin’
“Marketing” has an image problem. Go ahead, ask the five people closest to you right now, “what would you say ‘marketing’ is?”, I can almost guarantee that they’ll respond with five different answers.
- It’s convincing people to buy your products
- It’s assisting the sales team in generating leads
- It’s selling the brand
- It’s the art of creating relationships with your target market
- It’s the nurture of customers to increase loyalty and referral
- It’s growth hacking
- It’s the 7/5 Ps
“Marketing” has fallen into the trap that, ironically, marketers exist to pull their clients and employers out of: it is being defined by what it does, not what it is.
Take a brilliant marketer’s often misquoted statement, “blah blah blah it’s all about stories…”
Seth Godin is right, but he’s also misunderstood.
Good marketing requires a good story, but that story needs to be told through the right channels, at the right time, to the right people, with the right call-to-action. ON TOP OF THAT, there needs to be the right data capture tools and the right people to interpret that data to create insights. THEN, you will need to go back to the drawing board and review the best way to tell your story, based on data.
Marketing is a cyclic approach that needs to be treated as a machine that can be consistently optimised, which means that process and automation are vital to modern marketing strategies.
Marketing as a Machine
Just having a good story isn’t enough! You need to have a systematic way of applying your story in order to attract your customers and recruit them into your brand. Then, when they’re in, you need a systematic way to make their story part of yours, and use THAT to recruit even more customers!
When your customers get pissed off, you need a systematic way to understand why they’re pissed off and what needs to be done about it. When they are happy about things, you need a systematic way to allow that happiness to become part of your brand.
I could talk about parts of the marketing machine ad infinitum, but the point is this: your story is only half the battle, being able to systemise your story will enable you to increase the efficiencies of your marketing, which will then increase your Return on Investment (ROI) and lower your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) while increasing your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
See what I just wrote there? That’s the definition of marketing! I’ll say it again…
Marketing is the systematic use of communications and data to lower a firm’s Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and increase its Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
As a marketer, if you subscribe to this definition it then becomes a simple equation: is CLV>CAC?
If no, then we need to get into the machine and fix that shit up. If yes, then what can we do to increase efficiencies in the marketing machine? If we can’t do anything more to optimise the machine, then what are we doing here? Let’s automate our jobs and go live on an island, preferably one where advertising is illegal :P
Tom Uhlhorn runs Tiny, a Customer Experience Design Firm based out of Melbourne, Australia. Tiny specialises in experience design, branding, and agile marketing services. We try and fire ourselves after 12 months with every client.
