Integrated Marketing | See Marketing as Part of Your Core Offering
How do you think about marketing?
Is it merely a promotional channel, a cost center to control, or a list of tactics that needs to be executed? Or could it be more?
If you are ready to start seeing marketing as an investment, instead of an expense…keep reading. I will show you how to start thinking about marketing as an integrated part of your core business offering, a way to provide real value to your customers.
How Do I Build a Carrot? | The Wrong Idea About Generating Leads
This idea has been rolling around in my brain for the past couple of months...and it started to culminate yesterday during a business meeting. My wife and I were mapping out our own ad campaign and naturally started to discuss “lead magnets.” You know, those PDF’s or quick video guides that companies have on their websites to entice you to give them your email address.
Because everyone says you need to make a lead magnet. To get email addresses. To sell people stuff. Period.
So, there we are, trying to think of something that would be valuable for our audience.
What tidbit of wisdom could we share to make us seem like a great company to partner with to create brand films?
What PDF would be good enough to merit someone’s email address?
And we sat there. And sat there. And kept thinking.
We thought back on all the times we’d given away our email address to get a lead magnet from another company. Most of those disappointed us.
How many of you honestly enjoy giving away your email for something that sucks?
It’s a bad feeling, but a very common experience.
We realized we were having a meeting about how to create something that wasn’t great. We were kidding ourselves into thinking we were creating something valuable. Instead, we were trying to quickly think of something that would convince people to provide their email addresses. Because that’s a standard lead generation funnel. That’s just what you do.
Standard lead generation thinking goes something like this:
How do we make a carrot to dangle in front of someone?
How do we craft cheese to put in our marketing mousetrap?
That line of thinking is stuck in thinking about marketing as beginning at the top of the funnel and ending at the bottom of the funnel. That’s all marketing is. It starts and stops where your funnel starts and stops.
I’m starting to slowly understand that type of thinking is a huge missed opportunity for marketing. Marketing should be thought about as an integrated whole to your entire product offering.
And with those thoughts, we threw the whole idea of creating a lead magnet out the window for now. It didn’t make sense for us. We weren’t actually thinking about creating genuine value for our audience. We were just creating a bait and switch, tricking ourselves into thinking “no, but we’re giving them something of value.” We had to pull the plug completely because it didn’t align with our values.
Integrated Marketing | Marketing = Extension of Your Core Offering
Rather than merely promoting your service, product, or mission, you can leverage marketing as a joint effort in distributing your value proposition. It can work in tandem to enhance and raise the value of your product and offering to your customers.
A business’s value is directly correlated to the value it creates for its target market.
That’s just a very cold way of saying: The amount of value other people believe you have and pay you for is the amount of value your business has.
That’s it.
You can’t get away from that unless you’re an internet service provider (formally known as cable providers...looking at you Spectrum). You simply can’t exist by treating people like crap.
The value of your company is directly tied to how much value your customer feels. You can’t have a company that doesn’t provide value to people. The market doesn't support it. It closes up.
If that’s true, then why not leverage all of the facets of your company to add value to your core offering? Make marketing’s sole purpose to add as much value to your audience as possible - not fake value, not bait and switch value, not silly little “how do we give them a little piece of cheese so they’ll go through our funnel maze?” nonsense. Provide genuine value.
Marketing = Salesmanship
Here’s another thing: Why are we so focused on lead generation all the time?
I get that we need to make sales and must focus some energy on this. But there seems to be an unhealthy amount of attention on it.
Let’s take a look at salespeople. If you study them, you’ll see they have long lasting accounts due to the relationships they’ve built. They’ve become business friends, perhaps even genuine friends. That’s why they’ll have business relationships go on for several decades. They understand that business is a relationship.
If that’s the case, then great marketing and advertising ought to be salesmanship at scale. Marketers should approach their work with that same mentality: show up to establish a relationship with your audience and then pour into them.
In a sense, this is about improving customer retention. But it’s also about continuing to solve the problems your customers have through your content marketing channels. Don’t just think about your content marketing channel as a funnel to generate leads. Instead, think about it from the perspective of having incredible customer service. Keep giving your audience great stuff and keep them engaged in your brand.
The stats show it’s worth your investment to take the best possible care of your current customers.
It’s 5 times more expensive to get a new lead than it is to get a current customer to buy from you.
Just a 5% increase in spend into customer retention will result in a 25% increase in profit.
The probability of selling to a current customer is anywhere from 60-70%, whereas for a new customer it’s 5-20%. Current customers are also more likely to buy new products and new offerings because there’s already that established level of trust.
It always frustrates me when companies don’t honor their current customers. I already talked about cable companies, so I’ll pick on apartment complexes now. They have the exact same strategies. If you’ve ever lived in an apartment, you know what I’m talking about. They offer deals to the new customer and never offer the specials to their current customer base. It makes absolutely no sense! Instead of investing in customer loyalty, they’re incentivizing churn. That’s what happens when you offer deals to new customers only, where you’re just focused on new leads. You’re incentivizing a churn culture. Why not try investing in the customer relationship and reinforce your value proposition with your marketing all the time?
Marketing’s New Mission | Increase the Value of Your Core Offering
By making this mindset shift, you’re not only increasing your brand value, but your product value as well.
Think about this: What if when someone bought your product, you sent them an entire package of valuable supplementary materials about it? It could include onboarding materials or an entire tutorial series to teach them about what they’re using.
I recently bought a new microphone. What if the company had sent me an entire digital packet about it? Not just some crappy printout or “quick start guide.” What if it included a really cool and helpful infographic? What if it had a couple of useful tutorials about mic placement and technique? What if it included a Trello template for how to think through a podcast workflow?
Are your gears turning yet?
What about your company’s newsletter? Those can seem like checkboxes, too. Even companies that are supposed to provide education, seem to only produce the lowest common denominator material for their audience. For example, Adobe is supposed to be serving a professional corporate audience. And yet they’re just giving you beginner tutorials all the time in their emails and newsletters.
There's a lack of respect for audiences.
Don’t we have better data about who we’re actually talking to here?
People want something they can sink their teeth into.
That’s why YouTube influencers are just blowing up. There’s such a lack of boldness within these organizations to start using marketing to actually enhance the value of their product offering. Instead, people end up turning to YouTube to understand a product. The company has let them down and lost the opportunity to control the messaging and value of their product.
Invest in Your Customers | They Will Invest in You
When you decide to start approaching marketing from this perspective, inevitably you’re going to be leveraging word of mouth. It’s not the goal of this approach; it’s the natural outcome.
As you form that deep relationship with your audience, they’ll know you genuinely care for them because you’re creating actual value. It’s tangible. Useful. Your audience can trust you. They’re the ones supporting your company and giving it value. Therefore, it’s imperative to continue to provide value.
Think about it this way: Your brand is to your company the way UI/UX is to an app.
Is your customer base having a good brand experience at every touch point in your company?
Take a look at all the parts of your brand and ensure they are working together to exponentially increase your brand value. Check out our article on What is Brand Storytelling? to learn more about the 5 Parts of a Brand.
Ultimately, providing value to your customers = investing in brand value. The benefit of that is this: As you invest in brand value, you grow your own pricing power. Those two are intricately connected.
Marketing = R&D | A Unique Test Run for Future Offerings
Recently, I’ve been listening to an audiobook called The Lean Product Playbook. It’s a fascinating book. It’s really got my mind thinking a lot about lean product design and how that applies to my business. My product is marketing. That’s why I’ve been rolling around this idea of thinking about marketing as an integral part of the product you provide.
When you start thinking of providing service through your marketing…you can get a lot of ideas.
How can I add a service or product to elevate the customer experience?
How can I create content to increase the value of our core offering?
It’s a lot to think about and you may not even know where to start.
If you feel lost, here’s a starting point to wrangle in those creative thoughts:
What’s the value proposition of your core service?
What’s the market value you are creating?
Who’s your audience?
What problem do you solve for them?
Now continue to solve that problem with your marketing materials.
The beauty of approaching marketing this way is it starts to become R&D for unique value adds. You can actually use your marketing as a research area for different product offerings. lt’s your little test run. And if you get a bite somewhere, now you know where to invest more money to continue to elevate the value of your brand.
Summary and Charge
Start thinking about your content marketing as a product unto itself. It's a supplementary product that goes in tandem with your core offering. It elevates the value of your core offering. It elevates your customer experience. It elevates your brand value.
Not only that, but you’re also testing out unique approaches to delight your customer base. You get to create your own R&D section to test and create the minimum viable product in a marketing context.
I hope this encourages you to rethink how you’re currently approaching marketing. Are you only seeing it as a promotional pathway? If so, could you sit down with your team and reevaluate how to start adding value to your customer base? How can you start to solve problems for them in unique and delightful ways?
Go forth and create authentic value for your customers today.
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