The Edge Marketing

Outside of large corporations with multi-person departments managed by VPs or Chief Marketing Officers, creating a marketing function that demonstrably contributes to company growth can be a real challenge for service firm executives. Of all the overhead functions in an enterprise (that is, of all the functions that don’t contribute a dime to the revenue side of the books), marketing has the highest cost profile. Every single marketing activity costs money, from attending a local association meeting (business cards) to operating a booth at a big trade show (travel, brochures, space rental, booth structure, giveaways, and on and on—oh, and business cards). How can one be sure that the energy and expense will lead to the desired results?

Between cost and fuzziness of results, it doesn’t surprise me that anyone leading an organization treads warily when it comes to marketing. And it also doesn’t surprise me that in many small to medium service firms, it is the CEO or president who directly oversees marketing. For one thing, anyone on staff who has the skills to manage marketing is better deployed being billable (to help cover some of those marketing costs!). For another, it is crucial to get the messages and positioning right. Marketing presents the face of the company to the outside world, and that face needs to be attractive to target audiences. CEOs know their customers, they know their competitors, and they know how they want to position their companies in the marketplace. Who better than the head of the company to craft the messages and manage the tasks for all those costly marketing activities?

Who better? How about a marketing expert? I talk on a weekly basis with CEOs who have been managing marketing in addition to running their businesses and who have realized that it isn’t working. In every case, they are taking a piecemeal approach that costs more money than it should for less than optimal results.

Think of marketing as a mirror that reflects the company. The bigger the mirror, the more (and more accurately) it reflects. Ideally, we want a full-length mirror—one single reflection of the entire entity. This is “integrated marketing,” where the entire function is cohesive in appearance and message, from graphic design all the way to multi-faceted events. No matter where or how you encounter a company with integrated marketing, you will get the same reflection.

All the CEOs who contact me are using itty bitty mirrors to put together a mosaic for their marketing program. They use this graphic designer, that copy writer, this advertising agency, that public relations consultant. Online marketing jobs are done by different vendors from those working offline projects. All of these little pieces get cobbled together into a fractured whole, and the resulting reflection is confusing and distracting. The image is broken up, distorted, and the appearance of the entity has to be guessed at instead of seen clearly. This is “mosaic marketing,” with key messages seen and heard differently depending on where or how the company is encountered.

With mosaic marketing, activities are often reactive and in the moment: today we need a brochure so we go off and do that, tomorrow we need to change the web site and we go find somebody different to do that. The two activities may have very little (if any) overlap other than the company logo. Mosaic marketers jump on good ideas—let’s get company t-shirts, let’s do a white paper on that topic, let’s have a webinar for this offering—without connecting them into an overarching program. This isn’t rocket science. Using my metaphor, given that the goal is to accurately reflect the company, a full-length mirror beats out a mosaic masterpiece any day. Everything works with everything else to convey a cohesive and consistent image.

So why don’t CEO marketers go for the full length mirror? I ponder this question every time I come away from a conversation with yet another executive looking for a better solution. The only answers I have come up with are the predictable ones: time and money.

With all the demands on their schedules, CEO marketers don’t have the temporal bandwidth to proactively integrate marketing activities and ensure consistency across the board. And somehow they think that taking the mosaic approach is more cost-effective—though I am at a loss to understand why they think that hiring different providers for different services and trying to manage all of them successfully is cost-effective.

Just the opportunity cost of having the CEO’s time taken up with this stuff should be enough to stop the madness. There so many activities that only they can do; what are they giving up by keeping marketing, with all the tasks and activities that need to be managed, on their plate?

This kind of inefficient approach isn’t limited to CEOs; mosaic marketing is pursued by solopreneurs too. The same lack of efficiency and integration applies there as well, if not more so. With a one-person service firm, where company success relies entirely on the owner, why would that owner use so much of their time and energy on managing the marketing?

The way for a CEO (or solopreneur) to go from mosaic to full-length for their marketing mirror is simple: Take on a service provider to be the company’s marketing partner. Find a firm that can talk strategy, and then go out and make the right things happen. Hold this partner accountable for integrating the entire marketing effort, for producing measurable results, and for keeping costs optimized.

Do this, and your market will be able to see you much more clearly. Marketing will be better able to support sales, and you will be able to get on to other things that need your attention.

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