Reflecting on modern marketing

Hey! This is a warm-up article before I dive into specific topics. I wanted to highlight some of the curious things about marketing nowadays. So I thought why not make it a diary-like style?

Marketing battlefield: science vs art

At this point in my life, I’ve become curious about binary mindsets: structure and chaos.

With structure, you think like a bugless algorithm. You keep answering the criteria and evaluation questions until you produce valuable thoughts. For example:

• what is the goal of this article?

• what are the ways to reach this goal?

• which way would better reach the goal?

• how would I compare these ways?

A structural mindset is manifested in marketing via frameworks like 5P, jobs to be done, personas, positioning, unit economics, and so on. The evolution of data analytics pushes this mindset even further. We are now concerned with building decomposed dashboards that connect metrics between the processes – all in hopes to detect a profitable correlation.

With chaos, your thoughts take you to random places. They might be exciting, but not as profitable. However, chaos is good for creativity and especially helpful for generating hypotheses and business vision. Creative people are not bound by step-by-step processes. Instead, they jump from one association to another without any rules or thoughts like “oh, this association might not be as relevant”.

I’ve seen both of these mindsets in my marketing experience. And I’ve learned that it’s best when a chaotic person sets the vision for a structured person to execute it. These mindsets are interdependent. Without creativity, a structured person would perfectly execute the strategy even if it may be irrelevant to the big picture. Likewise, a creative person cannot properly execute a strategy because they don’t want to be limited by frameworks.

Personally, I have a structured mindset with an occasional shift to chaos when I feel like it. What about you?

Where does marketing fit in business?

Business owners have different expectations from marketing.
Some common points of view include:

1. A communication playbook: make your brand look appealing

2. ROI machine: set up multi-channel user acquisition and keep the costs below their lifetime value. In the general funnel view, marketing stays at the top to produce leads!

3. Growth engine: systematically validate business hypotheses by tracking the main metrics

What other points of view are applicable to marketing?

Regardless of the focus, it’s important to make marketing an extension of business goals. For example, the main business goal is typically revenue. So marketing solves this by cascading into revenue flows, funnel stages, and unit economics.

As marketing matures in new industries, we see how the top martech companies identify effective tactics. This is what happened with HubSpot Academy and B2B space. When you learn these tactics, it feels like there’s nothing more to them. That’s why I like the growth process – it never gets stale. Instead of using the existing tactics, the growth concept invites you to participate in a tactic-making experience.

Product market fit is king

I like how marketing strategies differ by company life stage. When you’re in a startup, you can’t just launch paid campaigns and expect the users to flock in. In the early days, marketing solves entrepreneurial challenges. It scouts the market for a place by talking with first customers and letting them test your product.

In this beta phase, it’s important that a product finds the fit between its features and the people who need them. The introduction of product-market fit quantifies the success of a startup. There are 2 common approaches to measuring PMF:

• Tracking user retention by weekly or monthly cohorts

• Asking users this question – how much would you be upset if our product had to shut down? The share of people who’d be very upset is your PMF!

When you’re looking for PMF, it feels like all the marketing is experimental. You don’t get to build user acquisition processes until you test the basic idea behind them. Even when the company finds its PMF, the experiments should continue.

Another thing I like about the PMF approach is that it denies market entry to bad products. When a startup can’t improve PMF, it leaves no choice but to pivot and create a different product. It’s like an agile mindset that can drop the old beliefs to adopt the new ones – all in order to get unstuck and grow!

Can you recall situations when you changed your opinion on a business process?

The sales root

At its core, marketing is actually sales. It’s all about showing the value and exchanging it for money. As time passed, a need for the bigger picture emerged. That’s when sales diverged into the modern definitions of “sales” and “marketing”.

Marketing has become a large-view sales operation:

• researching competitors and target audience

• creating the visual and communication style

• planning revenue at appropriate acquisition cost

There’s one mutual component between marketing and sales – communication. Marketing improves its campaign and product communication by getting insights from the sales team. In fact, marketers can attend sales calls for their research sessions. That’s why the most important marketing-sales alignment is about communicating product value.

What are the other alignments that should happen between marketing and sales teams?

Marketing as a communication framework

No matter how good your product is, someone needs to translate its features into the right words and pictures. This translation works only if it resonates with a listener’s deficit – they won’t buy it if they don’t need it.

In this sense, it’s important to help a customer imagine how they use your product. To do this, marketing uses things like:

• landing pages with product descriptions

• problem-solving articles describing their product as a tool-to-solve

• video reviews

But nothing beats “imagining” like actually using the product. That’s why simple UX and trials have become mainstream. They reduce the friction for people to start using the product. The UX then makes sure that a user experiences the value while using that product.

Marketing communication is hard! Your potential users must interpret your information the way you meant it. On top of that, you also need to mirror your buyer persona: use their language and hero images. Luckily, customer development solves this challenge. The more you get to know a specific type of people, the more you start thinking like them.

And then there’s an issue of complexity vs simplicity. It’s like there are 2 schools of thought:

• If we say as much information as possible, we’ll show ourselves as complex and therefore smart. For example, government websites with long paragraphs without breaks.

• If we say as little information as possible, we’ll show ourselves as relevant and therefore needed — for example, this concise Spotify landing page.

I wonder how easy would it be to disrupt a corporation by using a simpler communication approach!

When was the first time you had to think about the right text for your marketing messages?

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