Marketing Struggles: The Root Cause Lies in the Message, Essentially
Marketing Struggles: The Root Cause Lies in the Message, Essentially
Joe Garber serves as the Chief Marketing Officer at Kainos Consulting, a worldwide management consulting firm catering to various client needs.
These days, marketing seems to be becoming increasingly muddled with an endless supply of tools and expert advice. With a slowing pipeline, leadership teams might find themselves asking numerous questions: Are there deficiencies in our martech stack? Possibly. Is the sales team failing to follow up on every marketing-qualified lead? Likely. And are our programs not integrated enough to touch a potential buyer enough times to induce action? Almost certainly.
In my career as a marketing executive, I've been summoned multiple times to diagnose and rectify existing marketing issues and plans. Particularly when a company is on the cusp of its next growth phase, there often lurk glaring errors that the leadership, investors, or board would like addressed immediately.
Under such circumstances, it becomes easy to fall into the trap of pursuing quick wins.
The Brutally Honest Truth: It's All About the Message
Before you dive headfirst into the intricacies of strategies and tactics, which could potentially complicate your marketing approach even further, pause and consider what truly drives your marketing outreach: the message itself.
Veterans of American politics, irrespective of their political leanings, will be familiar with James Carville's notorious 1992 maxim: "It's the economy, stupid." As a campaign strategist, Carville was on a mission to keep his team focused on the most impactful driver of voter action. Among all the tools at his disposal, the economy served as the foundation. Without nailing down the core, all other efforts to reach his audience would prove ineffective.
Marketing success boils down to a similar premise: It's all about the message, plain and simple.
This basic principle is instrumental in activating the desired action, such as filling and progressing the funnel. Once you nail it down, other marketing initiatives, like revamping your website, raising awareness, developing a content strategy, and maintaining a cadence for digital marketing, will legs autonomously.
Phase One: Contextualizing the Big Picture
Starting with messaging as the foundation for an enhanced marketing strategy is straightforward in concept yet beset with hurdles in practice. How frequently have you observed founders fashion a straightforward tagline and presume the messaging task is complete? How often is product marketing overlooked or decoupled from the rest of marketing? Or how often is positioning dictated by the development team, enamored with the product's capabilities, and technical snapshots and demos serving as the default narrative?
Raise your hand if you've attended any marketing-related webinar recently and remembered the topic of the ideal customer profile (ICP) being a popular conversation at board meetings. Marketers are constantly bombarded with ICP-related queries and, understandably so. Defining your target audience forms the bedrock of establishing sound messaging, but the process continues beyond this first phase.
As a marketing leader, it's up to you to help your leadership team identify the remaining gaps and push the messaging exercise forward.
Phase Two: Injecting Life into the Story
I've had the opportunity to embark on numerous corporate re-messaging projects throughout my career, many times benefiting from the expertise of professional marketing agencies. The first steps are usually consistent (and important): interviewing executives, customers, partners, and thought leaders on key points, followed by organizing the information in a way that brings the most prominent points to the forefront.
The good marketing strategists analyze the message through the eyes of the ICP—identifying clear use cases where the company's offerings can be applied, highlighting areas where these use cases are less effectively addressed today, and showcasing how the company can differentiate itself in addressing these challenges. The side effect of this approach is that it encourages a shift in focus from the 'how' and 'what' to the 'why.'
The great ones synthesize this differentiated set of outcomes into a narrative. A sequence of a few slides, commencing with an analysis of evolving market dynamics and associated risks facing a potential customer, is followed by an updated set of buying criteria, framing the story's beginning. The narrative then highlights how the company's offerings can uniquely address these criteria and what that implies in terms of cost, risk, and scale, concluding the story within 20 minutes if executed effectively.
Phase Three: Wrap It Up for Consistency
Constructing a simple messaging framework deck isn't the final step in resetting the foundation of your marketing strategy, but merely the first in a series of ongoing tests and refinements. Once you're confident that you've got it right, test it again. And again.
Armed with market insights, you can codify the messaging framework as a message house, enabling your marketing and extended team to leverage this foundation in building out supporting content and assets for your marketing plan. With this messaging house at the forefront of your marketing plan and outreach, supported by ongoing enablement, you can rest assured that your message is consistent across all your channels.
Conclusion
Marketing isn't inherently difficult if you don't make it out to be. Yes, there are many tactical (and even strategic) elements to manage—often across large teams and on a global scale. But if you embrace the Carvillian concept that "it's all about the message," you can establish a firm foundation, making everything that follows much simpler.
To achieve this, ensure you effectively convey the essence of your message to others, devote resources to narrative crafting, and then distribute it in a uniform manner to various sectors of your organization for consumption.
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In the context of the discussion on marketing strategies and their effectiveness, Joe Garber, as the Chief Marketing Officer at Kainos Consulting, could be consulted to diagnose and rectify any existing issues in their marketing plans, especially during a company's growth phase.
Given his experience in corporate re-messaging projects, Joe Garber's expertise could be invaluable in helping Kainos Consulting's leadership team identify and address gaps in their messaging, allowing them to establish a solid foundation for their marketing strategy.