Do I have your attention?

If your buyer doesn’t know about you, then you’ll never have sales. And if you don’t have sales, then your business doesn’t survive.

Marketing is the critical business function of creating awareness of a business’s offerings. This issue will provide you an overview of what Marketing is really doing and why it matters.

1. Intro to Marketing

Before I dive into marketing, I think it’s worth explaining what a market is. A market is a group of people who are able and willing to buy a product or service.

One of the core responsibilities of marketing is to figure out who these people are. They need to know things like:

• What makes them unique?

• What is their profession?

• What industry are they in?

• What is their demographic?

• What needs do they have?

Once a market is identified, the next goal is to figure out how to speak directly to this market. This involves answering two questions:

• Where are they?

• How do i get their attention?

Where are they?

Marketing is everywhere. Well, actually marketing is everywhere where there are people. A billboard in a desolate forest wouldn’t be very effective.

Similarly, a billboard for the wrong person would be just as useless. This is why the next task for marketers once they’ve identified the group they want to serve is to figure out where they are.

Are they older and interested in politics? They’re likely on Facebook.

Are they a college student? They’re probably on Youtube or Tiktok.

Do they work on Tech? You might see them on LinkedIn.

The more unique the market, the more specific marketing can be. Thus the more effective it will be.

Once Marketing figures out their target market (i.e. their buyers), and where they are, their next challenge is to figure out how to capture and maintain their attention.

How to get their attention?

Because marketing is everywhere, this also means that attention is scarce. This is the great marketing challenge.

You’ve identified your buyer, and you know where they are. How can you compete for their attention when nearly every second multiple people are trying to do the same thing?

If a marketer has done their job well, then they’ll have one piece of information that will help them capture their buyer’s attention. Their needs.

The better Marketing understands their buyers’ needs, the better they will capture their attention. They’ll take advantage of this attention to promote a product or service the best solution to that buyers’ unique problems.

Connecting the dots

Many people believe that the goal of Marketing is to generate leads. But this is mistaken.

The goal for Marketing is the same as it is for Sales, and the same for the business as a whole. The goal for Marketing is to generate revenue. The best Marketing and Sales partnerships understand this and work together to accomplish their goals.

That said, marketing will certainly produce leads. These leads are called, believe it or not, Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL).

MQLs are similar to Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) in that both are making sure a buyer is a member of the market they are targeting. The only difference is that Marketing qualifies buyers through different methods of engagement.

Examples of MQLs include:

• Buyer clicks on an ad

• Buyer downloads an informative pamphlet

• Buyer signs up for a webinar

Marketing is different from Sales in that they are connecting with the buyer through a different medium. They create awareness through their messaging, and qualify through the engagement of the Buyer.

This messaging can reach the buyer at different levels of their awareness of the product or service. It may be how the buyer first finds out about a product, or it could be what reminds them to purchase.

2. Beyond Attribution - How Data can actually help

There is a lot of data involved in marketing. Many data professionals are familiar with this data, and the work that’s involved.

Typically this work comes as a request from the marketing team.

“We need to understand what campaigns drove buyers to purchase?”

“What are the open rates of our emails?”

“Can we segment our customers to more effectively target our marketing?”

But now that we have more context on what marketing is trying to accomplish, the data community can take a step back and think outside the box on how to proactively help, rather than just respond to data requests.

Finding the buyer

Many startup founders want to build a product that they are passionate about. They convince investors to give them money, and use that money to promote their product through marketing.

This approach is probably backwards. A company is more likely to succeed by first figuring out who their buyers are, where they spend their time, and what their needs are.

Only then does it make sense to invest in marketing spend to capture the attention of this group. Data teams can help Marketing figure this out. A great place to start is to analyze customer data.

Answering questions like

• What are the demographics, professions, lifestyles, and hobbies of your customers?

• What is their behavior on the platform? How do they engage with the product?

• How did they find out about your company?

• Why did certain buyers not purchase?

• Did they provide any feedback?

Answering questions like these can help Marketing figure out how to reach buyers that are most likely to transact. It will also help the company better understand who buys from them, where they are, and how to further serve them.

3. Why Marketing is so important to the business.

For the same reason that Sales is so important to the business: revenue. If people don’t know about what your selling, then they won’t buy. If people don’t buy, then the company won’t have revenue.

Without revenue, you can’t pay the bills or reinvest profits to grow the business. Awareness is crucial to the business success.

The challenge for many businesses is that marketing can be quite expensive. Companies that use their data to make their marketing efforts more efficient will be able to see the best return on their marketing investments.

I’d love to hear how you’ve used data to help your marketing team achieve positive business outcomes. Send me a reply and I will share with readers.