The Effective Marketer

Recent grads and people from other fields usually have the wrong idea about marketing. After multiple years of interviewing people for marketing positions, working with marketing interns, and discussing marketing with non-marketers it seems that the non-practitioners form their ideas about marketing from:

• Having watched Mad Men and thinking that  marketing is advertising and it involves coming up with a crazy creative, tough negotiation, and a lot of romance
• Reading Seth Godin books and feeling like it’s about coming up with purple cows, telling stories, and something about forming a big tribe
• Watching  the mistakes that Southwest,  UAL, Baja Fresh and TGI Fridays, and others have made and then thinking they would  never do that because they are smarter than those big dumb brands
• Using Twitter and Face book on a daily basis and thinking that just because they have 100+ followers/friends and have top scores on MafiaWars/Farmville/InsertYourAnnoyingAppHere they are experts in social media and think is the only useful marketing vehicle
• Surfing the web for hours and wondering why don’t all those companies simply re-design their websites

I could go on, but you get the idea.

And then what happens? They get a job.  And with the job comes meetings. And in one of those meetings the  Sales Manager starts talking about quality of leads coming from Marketing, the CFO asks about  Return On Investment, and the CEO  discusses how marketing goals need to be aligned to the overall strategy and asks for comparison with what competitors are doing. Then some negotiation about budget goes on and when the marketing staff regroups there are a lot of spreadsheets being thrown together for metrics.

And those metrics take time. Metrics for email results (clickthroughs, open rates, deliverability, etc.), metrics for the website (visitors, pageviews, clickpaths, conversions, etc.) and for the pay-per-click campaigns (impressions, daily budgets, word rankings, conversions, etc.), and the list goes on. At the end of the day our brave new marketer starts wondering what happened to all the nice marketing creativity, brainstorming sessions, and cool toys he saw on movies and expected to be part of.

The harsh reality is that marketing, let me rephrase that, effective marketing is a dirty job. Sure there is creativity, there is coming up with new ads, a new website, brand discussions and user personas, but it is all backed by serious analytics. Results are what marketers are after. Everything else is a means to that end.

This bucket of cold water thrown at the newbies leave many upset. Our schools are partly to blame because very little practical marketing is taught (recent graduates know the four P’s but have no idea of how exactly to use them and what tools are available). Inevitably some will get disillusioned and leave the field of marketing. Others ‘get it’ and take the analytics side of marketing with gusto and become excellent at slicing data and putting it to work.

With time all that number crunching and metrics become second nature and while they are still important, the “fun” aspects of creative brainstorming, marketing positioning and message, filling walls with post-it notes, and even going to offsite meetings for some R&R before that big push towards a deadline are what you remember most.

To sum it up: Marketing is dirty. Numbers, statistics, and real grunt work is done behind the scenes. But we love it because our work is what makes or breaks a company. We love it!