A Primer for the Professional Marketer

Recently, we were a part of a large team of consultants who could not understand each other. What one person called “marketing,” another person called “advertising,” and yet a third called “communications.”

Why can’t we seem to get on the same page here? Folks who work in marketing and communications often have all kinds of work histories and experience, and most of them did not go to business school.

It’s likely that no one ever sat them down and defined a lot of the terms we’re all throwing around in our strategy meetings, including the words that are in our very job titles.

💃 LET’S. 👋 GET. 👯 ALIGNED.

Print this primer out and tack it up on your wall, so you can point to it the next time your team gets confused.

Marketing

Let’s start with the most common term. According to the American Marketing Association:

Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.

There are many different kinds of marketing, from Viral to Guerilla, and but the most important thing to remember about marketing as a concept is this: It’s the process of getting an audience interested in what you’re offering.

You may have heard of the 4 P’s of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion. By defining these four things clearly for a defined audience, marketers can create a strategy that leads to…

Sales

You hopefully know what this is already, but here’s a helpful definition from Hubspot:

Sales is a term used to describe the activities that lead to the selling of goods or services.

Marketers and salespeople should be besties, because marketing activities are meant to generate sales leads. These teams should be working together to align their strategy: The marketing team welcomes a customer to what you’re offering, and the sales team guides that customer through the purchase.

What (or who!) makes this alignment possible?

Communications

A communications team should be made up of experts in, well, communicating. This team focuses on crafting a story or message about your company or your products, and they figure out how to make that story compelling to the people who need to hear it.

Now, communicators don’t only exist for the purpose of selling a product. A communicator might work on a public relations campaign, a speech by the CEO, a set of social media messages, and their company’s mission and values, all in the same day. Each of these things might be shown to a different audience; a communicator’s job is to understand each specific audience well enough that they can identify the MOST effective way to communicate with that audience.

The goal of each project might be to build awareness of the company, or to build trust and credibility on behalf of the CEO, or, yes, to help make a sale.

That’s why there are communicators with different specialties. Someone who focuses on public relations understands how to message a story so a journalist will write about it; someone focused on social media understands how, say, Twitter users communicate, and can shape a campaign to appeal to those Tweeps.

A great communicator on your team can also help with…

Branding

Definition time, thanks to Entrepreneur:

Your brand is your promise to your customer. It tells them what they can expect from your products and services, and it differentiates your offering from that of your competitors. Your brand is derived from who you are, who you want to be and who people perceive you to be.

Now, some folks think branding is only about logos. That’s certainly a part of it, but it’s not everything; as we’ve written about before, your brand is made up of lots of things, including the words you use in your marketing campaigns and the colors you use on your website. It’s in your design choices, your writing, your values, the furniture you pick for your office… it’s who you are.

Having a well-defined brand will help your communications team, your sales team, and your marketing team work well together. It’s the glue!