What’s Marketing’s Job? Sean’s list.

My friend and colleague Sean Branagan is one of the best all-round marketers I know.

The other day we were talking about the interactive marketing course he’s teaching at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School. While we were talking, Sean mentioned that he always starts out the class with a quick review of what marketing is. In Sean’ book, our job as marketers breaks down into four functions - all of which have to do with customers:

• Identify
• Attract
• Get
• Keep

Four easy pieces, right?

IDENTIFY: Since I come from a product management/product marketing background, my personal favorite here is Identify. Just what sorts of companies are we best suited to sell into? Which companies need what we’ve got? Which ones can we best serve? And, within these companies, who are the users, purchasers, and influencers?

Ideally, marketing will have worked to identify the customers before the product is done. After all, no one should be building a product if they don’t know who it’s for.

Hmmmmm.

Life being imperfect, often times marketers are charged with finding a market for something that’s thrown over the transom to them. I’ll bet this metaphorical scenario has been reenacted in more than one marketing department out there:

“Hey, look, there’s a big box in the middle of the floor. Wonder what’s in it?” asked Mary Marketer.

“Why don’t you open it up and see,” said Charlie Cando.

Mary somewhat gingerly opened the box. On one level she was excited - you never knew what surprise awaits - but she had found ugly surprises in similar boxes in the past. “Golly, it’s a new product,” she told Charlie.

Charlie moved in closer to see for himself. He reached in, took the product out, and started shaking it. “Wonder what it does?” he asked.

“Wonder who it’s for?” echoed.

“I guess we’ll just have to figure it out,” they both said simultaneously.

Yes, Mary and Charlie had certainly been there before.

All kidding (and truthing) aside, there are few things that marketing does that are more important than identifying the customer. If this doesn’t get done - or gets done poorly - you’ll have sales people flailing around; customers who aren’t a good match for your product but somehow got sold; and lost opportunities.

So you need to define your ideal customer sharply and carefully. And you really need to get in there before the product gets built. Chances are “they” won’t come up with a product that absolutely nobody wants - but I’ve seen some products that come pretty darned close.

ATTRACT:  Here’s where marcom’s arsenal of awareness building and lead generating comes into play. I’m not going to launch into a major treatise on what constitutes a good marketing plan. That depends on your market and your product. Years ago, I worked for a small (under $10M) software company that was acquired by a large (over $1B) company. We had five people on our marketing team; they had three. What was the big difference? Along with a handful of competitors, they sold their products into a very small set of very large companies. Other than occasional ads - as much to keep some market recognition of them as a public company going - and press/analyst work, they did very little “classical” marketing in terms of direct mail, events, etc. Their big deal was their annual user group, which they went all out for and which was regularly attended by hordes of their loyal, mostly pretty darned happy customers.

Most of us aren’t so lucky that we have this cleanly defined a market, so we need to come up with a mix of air cover and longer run strategies (press and analyst), and get-em-in-the-door tactics: old standby’s like direct mail, trade shows, and seminars, and newer standby’s like interactive marketing and webinars.

GET: Only in the mind’s eye of the most optimistic of marketers does Attract equate to Get. So here’s reminder that marketing’s job doesn’t end when the lead pops in. Marketing needs to make sure that they have touchpoints and materials that sales (and they themselves) can use throughout the sales cycle. Which means that you probably don’t want to think about the wisdom of having 100% of your fulfillment pieces out there for anyone and everyone to download all at once. You may want to hold some in reserve - like the implementation white paper that makes sense only when someone’s nearing the purchase decision. On the other hand, even if all the material’s out there and publicly available doesn’t mean that the person who downloaded it all is a) still a part of the sales process; b) has bothered to look at half the stuff they’ve downloaded (or even knows where it is). So it’s not a bad idea to send off something that’s generally available, yet is particularly useful given the stage of the sales cycle or a question/objection that needs to be answered. Nothing wrong with shooting off an e-mail with something attached that says, ‘I thought you might be interested in this.’

And here’s another reminder: it never hurts to inform the sales folks when there are new goodies - and how those goodies should be used. Don’t expect them to be cruising your intranet or website looking for the latest. Keeping them informed won’t fend off all of those irksome “waddaya got?” phone calls that always come in the second you’ve powered down and are leaving for the weekend - but it will fend off some of them.

KEEP: It’s easy for us to forget that marketing plays a central role in keeping customers. And we do so all along the spectrum, from helping make sure that the products continue to be strong, to making sure that our customers know we like them and are interested in them, even when we’re not trying to sell them something. In this vein, make sure that - while your sales and/or customer support personnel will “own” the relationship - marketing also has a direct role to play with customers - and not just when they want them to be press reference or case study. It can be a very small thing - letting all your Chicagoland customers know that you’re doing a show at Navy Pier, and would love them to drop by. It can be a call to see how things are going, and what would make like better. (One customer I spoke with during a recent Win-Loss analysis thanked me after our conversation for not trying to sell him anything - and he also agreed to a follow up request to do a case study.) If you have the type of product that lends itself to a user group, this presents an excellent way to build and solidify relationships with customers.

Just a few thoughts on Sean’s list of what marketing does.

Identify. Attract. Get. Keep.

That should be pretty easy to remember, even if it doesn’t exactly translate into a cool acronym.

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