A Bird’s Eye View of Marketing

Success in any business requires success in marketing. You can create the best product that anyone has ever seen, but if this product doesn’t get in front of anyone then no one’s ever going to buy it. Marketing is how a business gets eyeballs. And the reason marketing is such an umbrella term is because there are hundreds of different approaches to getting people to notice you.

Because of this, it’s hard to pinpoint marketing down to a single type of skill. The definition of marketing in the dictionary is “the action of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.” Thus, the problem a marketing team is always working to solve is “How do we get found among the seemingly infinite number of other companies trying to sell a similar product?”

Therefore a marketer's role is about figuring out what makes their customers tick and then using that information to add value to their lives via selling a product. Jerrod Harlan told me that he reads the magazines, blogs, and anything else that puts him in the shoes of the customer and this is why he’s such a successful copywriter. You’re don’t want to market to anyone random person on the street, so staying up to date on the market gives you a better picture of the needs and wants of the consumer are.

In my mind, I like to conceptualize marketing as being based on 2 main subfields. The analytical side of marketing and the front-end branding side of marketing.

Analytical/Interruption Side of Marketing

The analytical side of marketing includes mainly advertising. Whether it’s the traditional billboard/TV/Radio ads or the more modern social media and google ads.

There seems to be a common misconception that ads are purely creative, such as Super Bowl ads and creative videos. But ads are a highly analytical process, following a systematic process and funnel and tracking results every step of the way. In online advertising there’s A/B split testing, retargeting, algorithms, customer journeys, geofencing, the list could go on and the ways in which businesses are reaching consumers are getting more complicated by the day, but it really doesn’t have to be. The basic premise is simple “try, fail, see what works, change, try again, fail again, change again” until you end up at an ad that converts well and brings in more money than it costs to run.

Because of the analytical nature of today's ads, it seems the majority of advertising is moving away from traditional TV, Billboard, Radio ads and moving to mainly online advertising. The traditional advertising models were based on reach, get your brand in front of as many people as possible hoping that leads to more sales than the ad is worth. It was virtually impossible to understand exactly how many people are seeing these ads and how much revenue these ads are actually bringing into a business.

On the other end, online ads ( or Pay Per Click ads) can be tracked to even the smallest data points that would almost seem useless at first. With the wealth of data and analytics, marketers can now precisely target certain people and track exactly if the ad is working or if it needs to be changed.

The tracking capabilities are going even further then just clicks though. Have you ever noticed how if you visit an amazon product, wherever you go for weeks later you’ll get an ad for that product across the internet? Advertisers now have the ability to retarget (with the use of pixels) by adding a single line of code into their ads.

On top of that, split testing makes it very easy to increase the effectiveness of any ad that is put out online. All the marketer needs to do is run two almost identical ads, with just one aspect changed and see which one produces better results. And then continue to split test again and again until the ad is producing a positive return on investment (ROI) for whatever the aim is of the ad.

For example, here’s an ad that I split tested using the Facebook ad platform and a few of the analytics that are important.

As you can see, the cost per conversion was significantly lower ($0.12 vs. $1.20) therefore I stopped running the ad with the higher cost and continued with the ad that had a significantly lower cost. Then from there I split tested the lower cost ad to make it even more efficient. And with a few iterations of testing, I was able to build my email list for less than $0.10 per email.

This shows how important the analytical side of marketing is. If I didn’t have any of these analytics than I would have had no clue which ad was performing better and I wouldn’t have been able to make the changes that I made and the results would have been much harder to achieve.

The effect that page layout and website design have on conversion is also highly front-end, it’s based on analytics of what works and what doesn’t. What pages the users stay on the most and what pages have the highest bounce rates(leaving the website completely without visiting another page.)

But as most people realize, marketing is more than just advertising. It involves adding value and creating content that anyone can view for free.

Front-End/Permission Side of Marketing

The front end side of marketing includes less analytics, but the nature of this marketing is still more trial and error than creative based. On this end of marketing, the psychology of marketing plays a larger role. The person that understands why people make the decisions they do will be better equipped to create content that people enjoy and build trust to keep them coming back for more.

Some role types that are associated with the front end of marketing include website design, content marketing, social media marketing, and the like. Where marketing used to rely completely on interrupting someone now marketing is starting to look a lot less obvious and more like regular content that is indistinguishable from an ad.

Understanding that people make decisions based on emotion rather than logic can be an important point to keep in mind because content can then be catered to emotion more than explaining why one product is better than another. Writing articles and creating videos that appeal to someone’s emotions creates a positive association with the business that’s not possible with interruption marketing. For example, no matter how compelling the case if for an alternative to the iPhone or Samsung galaxy, people are going to stick with these brands because they trust them and have emotional identifications with these products.

All the really influential marketers of our day like Gary Vee, Seth Godin, Ramit Sethi, and Neil Patel explain how important it is to add real-world value to your customers and viewers and not try to force your product down their throat. Here are a few resources that explain just that:

• 1,000 True Fans Article — Kevin Kelly
• Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin
• Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin
• Permission Marketing by Seth Godin
• Now is the time to CRUSH IT by Gary Vee
• Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook by Gary Vee
• The Thank You Economy by Gary Vee
• Zero to Launch course by Ramit Sethi
• Content Marketing — Neil Patel

Both these sides of marketing are highly interconnected because without a brand the ads would be useless, but without the ads, it would be much harder to gain a large viewership of people that are coming to the business in the first place.

Marketing is a very broad field and I hope this article gave a meta-perspective and birds-eye view of what marketing really entails.