Blog: Marketing
What does Marketing mean to your organization?
The term “Marketing” has different meanings for different companies and under different circumstances. Some define marketing in terms of simple activities that lead to, for instance, printing prospects, product brochures, and perhaps maintaining a website; while others may go as far as undertaking activities to size up the market, segment their industry, do competitive analysis, market demand surveys and so on. Some differentiate between marketing, strategic marketing and marketing communication and some don’t.
Some have a checklist of activities based on which a marketing budget is drawn up and afterward the main goal becomes to be able to tick all the boxes while staying within the allocated budget (and pray that the budget does not become a cost-saving initiative low hanging fruit in the fourth quarter). And some go as far as creating marketing strategy document(s) and plan(s) to justify what needs to be done and why. Depending on one’s perspective, the company culture, their business model and what clients they serve, “Marketing” may very well become a series of tasks that a small team can cope with, all the way up to breaking up the marketing strategy document – provided that the company has one – into daily tasks and cascade them down to different departments and individuals within the company. After all, Marketing should be what the organization lives daily and not what the Marketing department does behind closed doors, right?
no matter where you are standing in this spectrum, one of the key elements becomes tactical execution and measuring the outcome(s) against the initial assumptions
In my opinion, no matter where you are standing in this spectrum, one of the key elements becomes tactical execution and measuring the outcome(s) against the initial assumptions. While the companies keep a very close watch on their top-line and margins and a bunch of other KPIs required for making financial reports for the banks or shareholder meetings, measuring the return on marketing spend especially in B2B is more often put on the back burner. What some marketing professionals have even succeeded in doing is to convince their superiors that this stuff is almost impossible to measure and therefore let’s just keep on doing what we have done in the past and already know. i.e., run ads in the same publications, host the same events, go to the same exhibitions. Translation: stay in our comfort zone.
Well, it is indeed hard to measure the return on marketing investment or ROMI as some marketing gurus call it, in a B2B environment. After all, how would one measure the return on an advertising campaign in a trade journal if you are a producer of head-up displays for different car manufacturers? Or supplier of pressure valves to system integrators? Whatever the answer may be, there is for sure not a magic formula or an App you can download from the AppStore that would magically crunch some numbers and calculate the ROMI for you. But perhaps the marketing folks, including myself, have not been defining the problem the right way and along with it have been using the wrong set of tools to come up with a solution to this problem. Let’s face it, B2B companies simply waste a huge amount of money undertaking marketing activities and spend probably the same amount on activities that actually do move the needle. The problem is, in my opinion and as it has been said many times in the past, they can’t identify which half is wasted and which half is not.
by: Ali Hoorsun, December 2019