Marketing is...
The deceptive simplicity makes explaining it complex
Let’s get the trite out of the way right up front: everyone thinks they can do marketing. At least in most companies, there are many people who look at what marketing does — buy some keywords, run some ads, build a website, create a datasheet, hold an event, etc. — and think I can do that. At least this is the stereotype that marketers like to believe and like to convince others is true.
The truth, I believe, is a bit more subtle.
Marketing appears easy because marketers often shy away from explaining the full complexity of what they do or explain it poorly. I am likely as guilty of this as anyone.
More specifically, marketers often don’t explain everything because we want to maintain a bit of the mystery and magic behind what we do, or we don’t fully understand it ourselves. Much like most of the passenger on a modern airplane, we really can’t explain why the plan flies1 but we are firm believers in the fact that it does fly. We drink cocktails and yet have a hard time explaining how tequila or mezcal are made2 or why they are so different.
When we try to explain — and we actually know what we are explaining — we often tend to overexplain, start from basic premises that annoy the audience, and end up not actually creating any real clarity.3
There are many parts of marketing, just as there are parts of the law, physics, engineering, and knitting4, that are fairly straightforward. It does not take an advanced degree in anything to understand that people search for stuff on Google and placing an ad when they are searching for your stuff makes sense5. What people fail to realize, and marketers often fail to explain, is that doing that at scale (10k or 100k keywords) and doing it efficiently takes experience and actual understanding6.
Today, marketers are facing a crisis of sorts because of changes to things like cookies and email tracking. These changes are forcing marketers to admit that a lot of the so-called science behind what they have been doing for years is mostly just tracking, stalking, and guessing. Makes many even more reluctant to explain what is going on behind the curtain.
Look, I love marketing and I know7 that to do it well requires more than instinct and good intentions. What I think we need to do as a profession is get a lot better at explaining the full scope of what we do to others, stop being defensive about it, and start demonstrating the connections between our actions and desired business outcomes.
Revealing the truth behind what we do, and admitting the things we don’t know, will ultimately make us better marketers.
By “we” in this sentence I really mean “me.” I have been accused more than once of “pontificating.”
Nothing about knitting seems straightforward to me at all.
Usually…but there are exceptions to even the most common sense things.
I recently explained that knowing which keywords people are searching for is the easy part. Accepting the reality that there are only so many people actually searching for most of those keywords and no amount of money spent with Google is going to increase that number, so you have to find other ways to make more people who might be customers search for your relevant keywords which is why we do brand advertising (but no one outside of marketing seems to understand this).
or at least think I do