Marketing Communications (MarCom): What We Actually Do Within Marketing Teams
There are career guide descriptions of what marketing communications professionals do. But here’s how I’ve experienced it, running the function for tech startups
Recently, I joined a (mostly) remote company whose aim is to bring personalized learning and development (L&D) that can be measured at scale.
L&D’s simplest translation is “training” — but it’s really about using whatever methods work best to help employees to reach their full professional potential.
This marks the third time in my career that I’ll be handing out business cards adorned with the title Marketing Communications Manager. It’s a set of responsibilities that I’ve consistently enjoyed.
Most people who know me, however, think that I’m a “writer” or “content writer.” This speaks to the fact that a lot of people see marketing communications and writing as analogous when they’re not exactly the same thing.
My intention with this blog post is to provide my perspective from what managing marketing communications is actually like on the inside — rather than the official role descriptions you can probably find from your local careers counselor.
Before I get going there are two things to point out:
- From everything I’ve been able to discern, marketing communications / MarCom managers are more likely to be employed in smaller organizations. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t people in the world holding titles like SVP of Marketing Communications and working at enterprises. But rather because marcom straddles a few different fields, it’s more likely to be found among smaller marketing teams where everybody needs to wear a few different hats. In my opinion, that’s part of what makes it so much fun.
- My in-house experience has been exclusively with small organizations (headcount less than 100). I’ve worked with medium-sized and enterprise companies, but only as a contract writer. When there are thousands of employees on deck, things start to get very segmented.
I’m Sort Of The Last Line of Linguistic Defense At My Companies
An interesting dimension to my career thus far in marketing communications is that most of it has been spent working in Israel where English is obviously not the first language.
Israelis generally speak good English. But good English isn’t typically enough to convey a professional impression if you’re selling into a Fortune 500 market.
One of my unofficial responsibilities at every company I’ve worked with or for in Israel so far has been to serve as the unofficial language police of the organization.
This has meant that on a day to day basis I’ve reviewed everything from how colleagues are describing the company on LinkedIn (please stay consistent, please no typos!) to UX copy to the templates that the support team is using to communicate with customers.
Being the language police means viewing my colleagues with a healthy degree of skepticism — even those who speak English as a first language.
I’m pedantic. It may make me seem officious. But I’d rather that than a proposal for millions of dollars worth of business go out the door containing obvious linguistic slip ups.
I have occasionally been called upon to arbitrate grammatical disputes between departments on Slack (yes, really). I’ve written memos pleading with colleagues to stop using the word “relevant” in every sentence. I am the language police. And the MarCom desk is my literary fortress.
I Also Write The Marketing Collateral
The above is referring to the type of input I provide when dealing with text emanating from the company that isn’t in my domain: like that coming from product or sales.
My domain is to create marketing materials that will resonate with our target audiences and explain what the organization does.
Everybody brings their own philosophy to their jobs, and one of mine is always to underscore the key differences between content marketing and thought leadership. But practically speaking I do both. Higher level thought leadership that resonates with an executive audience needs to be pared with more straightforward pieces of collateral that actually get leads in the door.
In all of my MarCom jobs, I’ve been expected to write the blog posts, fill up the content marketing calendar, and manage the company’s social media accounts (my favorite network for this, by the way is LinkedIn; in my personal life I spend as much time on Reddit).
Cultivating community is an important function and larger organizations often pay somebody just to focus on this. But sometimes answering comments on Facebook falls on the shoulders of the MarCom person too.
On any given day I might write a blog, create an email newsletter to promote the blog, write a few social media posts, and draft up a press release.
I Oversee PR And Sometimes Organize Events
The role of a MarCom manager will fluctuate as the company they work for scales up or down.
At the lower scale of things — my first job was at political technology software Ecanvasser where I was the first marketing hire (they’ve since grown!)—I took care of all aspects of PR.
That might mean proactively pitching the media, building media lists and sending press releases, and creating the type of collateral needed for all that to go off without a hitch — like speakers’ bios, one pagers, and the like.
I’ve also done my fair share of award applications and pitching executives for speaking engagements.
A the higher levels of scale, the PR function gets contracted. Either to agencies or solo PR practicioners. Once that happens, the MarCom manager will work with or oversee the work of a PR specialist. That might mean participating in weekly status update calls to oversee the work of an agency on retainer.
Sometimes ceding the day to day responsibility for PR is tough. But ultimately nobody can do it all. Pitching the media well takes responsibility and a lot of elbow grease. Sometimes, a MarCom manager will ghostwrite a piece that a PR firm will secure a placement for.
Much more broadly speaking, I try to look after the image of the companies I work for. This is a higher level concern that might bleed down into the messaging used on a landing page or the text that gets conveyed in an email.
I engage in basic brand monitoring and watch what competitors are saying and doing in the market. I want the world to be clear about what the company does and stands for.
I Work Closely With Sales Teams
Naturally, the essential element of marketing is paving the way for sales teams to do what they do best — selling and creating revenue that drives the success of the firm (slash keeps the lights on).
That’s why, as a MarCom manager, I’ve done everything from help develop sales battledress to listening in on competitor webinars to better understand their capabilities. True, it’s a sales function. But it’s important that we understand how competitors are branding themselves as well as what their differentiators are.
I have a lot of respect for sales and the work that they do. In fact, I’d argue that it’s impossible to be an effective marketer without understanding what the people on the ground are saying and doing. Sales, customer success, and support are the eyes and ears of the organization who hear unfiltered feedback all day long.
My advice to marketing managers or anyone else managing MarCom personnel: allow your marketing communications people to get on the road, to travel, and to meet customers — and don’t try to shield them from the bad stuff. You can’t sit in an office writing about a solution every day if you don’t have an intimate understanding of how it works, what the customers sound like, and what their pain points are that you’re helping to resolve.
Other Things I Might Do On Any Given Day
- Deploy some marketing automation using tools like Zapier to make my life a little bit easier.
- Build dashboards in Google Analytics to understand where traffic is coming from and preparing recommendations for prioritizing channels based upon that information.
- Outsource things that I know a lot less about — namely digital marketing — to contractors who specialize in SEO and PPC.
- Plan a marketing event and prepare a strategy to promote it.
- Get involved in higher level marketing strategy discussions in parallel with colleagues in branding and marketing (or the executive level).
Marketing communications is a busy job.
In fact, there’s so much to do that sometimes it’s hard to take a step back and understand what the big picture is about.
For me, it’s about making sure that the organization projects a clear image of what it does to the outside world and to customers.
At the highest level, I see it as about making sure that an organization succeeds in communicating what it really does and stands for to all its stakeholders. Sometimes, that leads to demand generation. At other times, the approach is a bit more oblique and moves to that sphere through brand awareness and reputation building first.
Of course we want to create content marketing campaigns that deliver ROI. That’s why companies pay us to do what we do. But I also try to come in at a slightly different level: making sure that we communicate a cohesive vision across the organization. Making sure that what our salespeople are reporting from the field is actually being heard at the executive level to get the buy-in needed to make any changes or re-communicate our vision. And that we’re delivering the kind of collateral that our market is actually going to listen to.
Cutting through the noise is difficult. Building a marketing “presence” that lays the ground for inbound lead generation takes enormous work.
Maintaining that presence, once it’s been built, and explaining what the company does to stakeholders takes persistent effort too.
Helping to achieve all these things on behalf of companies is part of what marketing communications practitioners do every day they turn up to work.
