Great marketing has nothing to do with budget size.
I must be slow. It took me some time to realize that!
I had lived in a “marketing bubble” at Adobe during its stratospheric growth years. We were cash-rich and proud! Our marketing was very impactful – or so we thought.
It was fine indeed, but the reality was that our tremendous success was less due to our highly creative and experimental marketing efforts.
And more due to brilliant product leadership and business strategies. Both had helped establish a stellar brand reputation, and the flywheel kept spinning in our favor.
Years after, I found myself heading marketing in a cash-strapped and less successful organization at Avid. Suddenly, the magic sentence – “These marketing programs will help our brand” – `didn’t unlock any budget anymore.
The products were solid, but the business was very challenged. There was no flywheel effect playing in our favor.
I had to completely rethink what would make great marketing in such an environment. Here are a few fundamental principles I started to understand better:
1 – Brilliant creatives are useless without a deep understanding of your customer
I mean, profound insights about what’s going on in your customers’ minds! Their goals, their big hairy problems, their values, their influences. Want to know the best way to analyze and act on these insights?
Have consistent, ongoing conversations with these customers. Not only did it help us build the right products, but we also shaped more impactful stories that genuinely resonated with these customers.
2 – If you think you can’T measure it, think again!
Having to fight for every marketing dollar spent was the best thing that could happen to me. It taught me that a marketer’s priority is to make sure everything they do is measurable.
Tracking meaningful metrics is tough. Traps abound if you don’t know how to interpret correlations. Still, the tech-enabled rise of metrics and analytics has helped so much. So I’ve learned to make sure I would systematically quantify my marketing impact at the planning stage. Then, track it, analyze it, course-correct and repeat!
3 – Successful brand-building requires resilience and long-term thinking
Once in a rare while, one single unique, memorable, and thought-provoking creative goes viral and takes your brand into the stratosphere. In most cases, though, I’ve learned it takes a lot of consistent repetition, adjustments, turnarounds, and perseverance in your marketing efforts to make an impact. Unless you are in a pure commodity and transactional business, you need to establish your story for the long haul.
These three principles go hand-in-hand and are not exclusive to marketing. They apply to every aspect of your business.
So, build a deep understanding of your customer, measure the impact of every action, and think for the long term.
Soon enough, you’ll be reaping the rewards!