Clicks 'n Conversions Blog

This article was first published June 13, 2007 on the Tatum Marketing blog

I was having a get-to-know-you conversation with a new prospect the other day, and I realized that as bright and successful as this person is, he really didn’t know what marketing could or should do for him. This, in my experience, is an all-too-common situation, so I decided to try and resolve it.

Let’s start with a deceptively simple question: What is marketing? It’s easy to say what marketing is not. It isn’t sales. And, it isn’t just advertising. It isn’t just networking or trade shows or a website or any of the other tools and activities that marketing sometimes uses.

Marketing is actually a process by which a company matches its solutions to the needs of the marketplace. The only thing you really need to remember about that definition is the word “process”. I’ll come back to it later.

The truly important thing to keep in mind is marketing’s primary purpose. It’s a two-step purpose, and understanding and remembering it could do more to make your marketing programs effective than hours spent with an expensive consultant.

Here it is:

The purpose of marketing is to 1) find and engage qualified prospects and 2) develop them into leads for the sales force. That’s it.

Now, it’s easy to get sucked into spending a lot of money on expensive branding or image advertising or slick corporate brochures. They look good. And they can be nice to have if you already have plenty of leads flowing into the outstretched hands of your sales team. But most of us don’t have that luxury. We need to generate leads.

So, let’s make it easy on ourselves. Let’s vow not to waste any more time or money on marketing “stuff” that doesn’t meet one of the two criteria for effective, results-oriented marketing, which bear repeating here:

1. Find qualified prospects, make them aware of you & get them to acknowledge interest in what you offer, or

2. Nurture and develop those prospects into people who want to do business with your company.

Keep these in mind as you select, implement or evaluate your marketing activities, and you’re likely to find your decision making much more effective.

Now, about the “process” part. If you’re selling high ticket, complex products or services – which most B-to-B selling is – the decision to purchase what you offer isn’t one single decision. Rather, it’s a series of smaller decisions to continue moving forward.

Your prospects are moving through a “buying process”, and you must meet their information needs at each step. That’s a marketing process. No single marketing tactic used in isolation can possibly be as effective as multiple tactics cleverly tied together in an integrated process.