Take your marketing to base camp first

Whenever I’m approached for marketing advice, I begin with a straightforward question:

"What have you done so far?

Most of the time, people dive into the details of their current efforts and the outcomes they’ve achieved. Almost immediately, they seek ways to enhance their existing strategies, which have often been in play for months, if not years.

My instinctual response to this is usually, “I don’t know, because I can’t know.”

This is better for my conscience than for my pocket.

For instance, if your social media efforts aren’t yielding the desired pipeline, my immediate inquiry would be about the competence of the team executing the campaigns. Assuming they are competent since they’re still employed, what reasons are they providing for the outcomes?

Such is the nature of consulting work, where the art of asking the right questions becomes the most crucial skill to hone. In the digital realm, where brief meetings are the norm, there’s limited time for deep exploration. Few entrepreneurs and founders take an entire day to work on a problem they’ve delegated to their team members. I hired someone else for that - or so they think.

Marketing challenges are as intricate as any other business issue. However, one key difference lies in marketing’s central position as an intermediary between the product and the customer. As such, constant communication with numerous stakeholders becomes essential, including product, customer support, sales, operations, and management.

Marketing shouldn't be perceived solely through the lens of channels.

Viewing social media, paid ads, billboards, etc. as isolated avenues to a sale is a dead end approach to managing your marketing team.

Unlike engineers or salespeople who have well-defined collaboration and accountability, marketers need to engage with each area to grasp what’s being sold better than anyone else.

The finest marketers train a sniper-like precision in their approach.

Thus, when someone asks me about improving their marketing results, I tend to repeat and rephrase to:

"What have you done in the past?"

In most cases, the answers are similar, if not identical, despite people claiming things were much different due to factors like processes and people.

When someone tells me that they have not done anything that has failed, that is a red flag for me.

Marketing and true marketing growth necessitate experimenting with radically different approaches. For instance, if you’ve solely focused on social media marketing, which revolves around pretty images and text delivered to people’s phones, I would inquire about your experiences with offline advertising, such as billboards, flyers, and direct mail. Those also use pretty images and text. But their fundamental nature is much different, is it not?

Such experimentation unveils new, surprising, and even better strategies.

Instead of seeking a mere 5% improvement in social media, invest that time, effort, and resources into something entirely new. Chances are, if you’ve been working on a channel for a while and sought help extensively, you’re probably not fundamentally wrong in your approach, although such cases do exist (but are rare).

Hence, I propose this framework for any company, especially early-stage ventures aiming to gain traction on their existing product:

Establish a base level of marketing for each possible channel – a minimum viable level of marketing operations. If experiments fail despite sincere efforts, consider it a positive sign.

Conduct experiments across all available channels to narrow down your target market and product-market fit. If only one channel shows promise in making sales, that’s your market, and you must adapt everything to cater to that channel’s audience.

For example, if I’m selling custom footwear for athletes and social media is the only successful channel, I’ll need to tailor my product for the young demographic that prefers bold designs and values aesthetics over durability.

Though the concept is simple, truly understanding and applying it can be challenging. Many visionaries desire to create custom footwear for every athlete, but that’s not always possible.

By running marketing operations in each channel, you’ll discover where the actual opportunities lie.

More often than not, you’ll need to adapt your product to fit the market, as only a few companies can successfully shape the market to suit their product.