Founders, owners or CEOs are often the pulse of the company. They may generate great marketing ideas based on their expert knowledge of the product or the right audiences.
But it’s easy to see the marketing function of a small to mid-sized B2B as a collection of soft skills, a creative second string to the sales department with less concrete KPIs.
And that impression is heightened by the number of ‘glamorous’ marketing activities on offer, from PR events, to attending conferences, running webinars, or creating a new brand book. Even corporate gift catalogues can be fun to flick through. Founders, owners, managers and non-marketing colleagues can feel they can get involved because, well it’s a bit of fun, isn’t it?
But these activities are the tip of the iceberg. Beneath you’ll find continuous, administrative activities that simply move marketing forward. Booking ads, editing copy, managing designers, signing off on endless website changes, or re-writing an email funnel.
Whether your marketing department is a series of ad hoc freelance hires, a single part-timer or a small team, meddling interruptions lead to detrimental effects on the marketing plan. So, here are six situations where you should let marketing do its thing.
Irrelevant ad hoc campaign ideas
“Hey I’ve got a great idea I saw on LinkedIn”
But the marketing team produced that strategy when everyone was in the room. When you have an agreed marketing strategy, a marketing plan and a schedule, then random new suggestions for campaigns or content aren’t just inconvenient, they also threaten the whole ecosystem. All forward-facing activities should come together and make sense. Give your plan time to work or not work.
Withholding from the customer
Marketing should educate the customer. It should emphasise the positives of the service or product and put into context the negatives. A large part of marketing’s function is to clarify and explain, to edit and simplify. Then you encourage your prospects and leads to step forward through their customer journey one step at a time.
If there are fundamental problems or drawbacks with a service or project, allow marketing to address this fact rather than hide it or ignore it. Otherwise, it’s a nasty surprise that either the sales department or onboarding operations have to address with new customers. A terrible start to a relationship.
Playing it too safe
You could argue that B2B marketing is possibly more conservative than B2C marketing. It doesn’t have the same reputation for creativity or leftfield thinking.
However, this does not mean that B2B marketing should simply copy the previous year’s marketing plan or marketing activities: attending the same industry events year in, year out, publishing the same content or running the same ads.
A veto on new ideas because “that’s the way we’ve always done it” is as much dabbling in marketing outcomes as any of the other situations described.
Copying the competition
Marketing does not exist in a vacuum. But competitor analysis is supposed to give insights into the customer’s journey not the competitor’s journey. Obsessing about a rival firm is counter-productive. You don’t become successful with your own business by making your platforms look and sound like someone else’s. That’s what AI is for.
A focus on new toys
I do believe that effective marketing needs some kind of tech stack and supporting framework of activities. And there are a lot of cool activities and toys on offer. CRMs, data and metric reporting, new websites, hosting events, video shoots, and press interviews.
But in the same way that new campaign ideas can be distractions, adopting a new tool or undertaking new marketing activities just on a whim are more often than not labour-intensive, expensive obstacles to achieving your marketing KPIs. They are not essential to success.
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