Marketing™ vs marketing … and How it’s All Marketing

There's Marketing and marketing, and both are the responsibility of Marketing(TM).

A lot of people think of capital M Marketing, when they think about marketing, and mostly that means they think about advertising or paid demand gen. Digital, social, display, print, broadcast, syndicated ads. The M here actually stands for Money.

But lower case m marketing, as practiced by Good Marketers(TM) is more than a monthly ad commitment. It's about going to market, one way or the other, and filling some kind of funnel. Over and over again.

If getting leads into the funnel and assigned to sellers is the last mile, to borrow a phrase from the trucking world, then a marketing campaign, activity or event is the second last mile. What happens prior to the second last mile is all the work of customer profiling, building playbooks, sharpening value messaging, articulating product market fit, building tools and platforms and communications strategies that all lead to the second last mile, and then support the seller in the last mile.

A marketing campaign doesn't have to mean boiling the ocean with display ads seen by tens of thousands, at a monthly recurring cost of tens of thousands, in the hopes of getting half a dozen pairs of eyes to see you and find their way to your landing page. It doesn't have to mean building out a fully automated process to manage hundreds of leads at scale.

It can mean that, for sure, and many times it absolutely should, but it can also mean hiring an intern to do some research to identify 100 strong-fit companies and ICP-matching contacts to target with direct messaging and outbound calls. This is especially cost efficient when you can wrap your arms around a segment of your target market. Maybe they all belong to the same super specialized association, for example, in a vertical that has a really strong fit for your product.

If a segment of your market has joined a super specialized association (i.e. not just the Produce Shippers of America Association, or the Fruit Shippers Association of America, but the Apple Haulers of America) then you have a dialect (apple hauling) that you can speak immediately, to a finite number of target prospects (The Apple Haulers of America membership directory).

Hiring an intern or junior marketing research person to identify, characterize, and prequalify 100 companies and 5 contacts at each company, backed up by all the pre-second-last-mile intelligence work you've done in identifying ICP, product market fit, etc., and then putting these prospects into the funnel along with a nice, apple-dialect pitch script and value proposition, targeted via email, good old fashioned outbound calls, and maybe backed by some banners on the Apple Haulers of America website, is also a marketing campaign, and the lower case m here stands for less money.

But it's all Marketing(TM). Don't forget to have some mix in your marketing mix.