“Marketing is too important to leave to marketers.” — David Packard

In my 20+ years of marketing experience, I’ve been part of agencies that have created extraordinary marketing campaigns—the kind that change lives and generate incredible revenue. Yet, those same agencies have also produced work that failed spectacularly in its primary task: creating and retaining customers.

You’re probably wondering, “What made the difference?” Why were some marketing efforts spectacular successes and others dismal failures?

Was it a change in the team? Was the JV team to blame for the failures?

Did the creative juice run out?

Were you phoning it in?

No, no, and no. The same creatives who created the spectacular successes created the dismal failures.

And most marketers I know, especially those with a successful track record, are driven and talented.

They feel a massive responsibility to do the kind of work necessary to justify the fees they charge.

The difference between their biggest successes and their most frustrating failures wasn’t how hard they worked or how creative they felt the day they tackled a project.

The most significant difference between the successful and unsuccessful campaigns I’ve seen in my career has been our clients’ marketing skills.

How well professional marketers perform often boils down to how compelling their client’s message is and how well those clients can communicate their message to the team.

The clients who came to us with a strong understanding of their customers and a persuasive message set us up to create incredible marketing assets.

But when their vision missed the mark? It rarely mattered how creative and hardworking we were. We struggled to bridge their message gap and create advertising that worked..

There Are Some Marketing Decisions Only Entrepreneurs (Or Their Leadership Teams) Can Make

Just like with computers, when it comes to marketing, “garbage in equals garbage out.” The quality of the input you provide to your creative team—your designers, copywriters, animators, and programmers—is the primary determinant of whether your marketing efforts will hit the mark or miss it entirely.

Think about it. You wouldn’t expect a gourmet meal from low-quality ingredients, would you? Similarly, you can’t expect a stellar marketing campaign from vague, uninspiring, or off-target input. Your creative team may be wizards at their craft, but they’re not mind readers.

Imagine you cannot give your marketers clear, precise, and high-quality information about your brand, customers, their problems, why they need your product, what would convince them, and the offers that will motivate them. Without that information, there’s little hope those marketers will magically create a marketing masterpiece.

One way garbage in = garbage out manifests itself is when a leadership team steers the marketers it hires to the wrong tactics or ineffective messages. Approach a marketing agency and say you think you need a new website, and it's virtually certain you'll get a proposal for a new website—even if it's your lack of advertising and not your site that is the real bottleneck in your marketing mix.

But the problem goes deeper than that.

Today, more than ever, your marketing success depends upon decisions that you make inside your business before you start to advertise and promote. These decisions will either set up your marketing strategy to succeed or create a hard ceiling on their eventual success. These decisions include:

• Your Audience: Who you design your products and services for, the problems you choose to tackle, and who you design your features to appeal to—these provide a foundation for your business and your marketing. As Peter Drucker once said, "The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer." Who that customer is, and the decisions you make on how you intend to create that customer, determine more than anything else the eventual success of your efforts.
  
  When I look back on the clients I've had who have been most successful with marketing, one thing that contributed greatly to their success were the decisions about the audience our clients made before we were ever involved. Our clients who had keen insights about who they wanted to serve and what those customers wanted made it much easier for us to find creative ways to appeal to their ideal customer.

• Signature Features/Benefits: No business can be everything to everyone. Especially when you're starting out and have serious resource constraints—in time, money, and people—you have to make choices which features you're going to prioritize in development. The features you choose to create will either make it easy to attract the attention of your ideal customer and motivate them to buy, or they will make it difficult, even with highly creative marketing, to distinguish yourself from the sea of competitors.
  
  The clients I've served who had strong marketing skills made decisions about product features that tended to turbocharge their marketing efforts. They designed products that almost sold themselves and lent themselves to creative and persuasive storytelling that attracted the attention of their ideal customers and motivated them to buy.

• Offers: Perhaps no factor contributes more to the success of a marketing campaign more than the quality of the offer a company makes to its customers.
  
  One decision that determines the persuasiveness of your offer is the marriage of what you're offering and to whom. If you're trying to sell ice to an Eskimo in winter, it doesn't matter how cheap it is; you're unlikely to succeed. But if you're offering water to an adventurer who has been lost in the dessert? You'll find an eager buyer even if you're charging an exorbitant price.
  
  Other decisions matter too. How much are you charging? Is there a payment plan? What other products or services will you bundle in your offer? How do you counteract your customer's concerns about your product? Do you offer a guarantee? Is there a limited time discount? Can you increase the feeling of urgency your customers feel?

While these decisions are crucial to the success of your marketing efforts, it's exceedingly rare that a marketing firm or marketing director will help you with those decisions. Marketers are trained to take these decisions as given and do their best to emphasize the positive features of the decisions the entrepreneur has made.

Frankly, that's probably a good thing. You don't want the average (or even the well above average marketer) to make those decisions for you. They have significant operational, organizational, and ultimately financial implicatations marketers are neither equipped to understand nor inclined to care about.

In some respects, that's bad news. If you're not getting all the leads, customers, and sales you need from your marketing, it's likely not just the fault of your marketers. You can probably trace some of the challenges back to decisions you've made and/or how you have communicated those decisions to the marketers you've hired.

Ultimately it's your responsibility to fix it.

Fortunately, There's Hope (Even If You're Not Good At Marketing)

The good news is that if you have managed to design a product or service that at least some group of ideal customers finds attractive and wants to buy, then you almost certainly have the skills and insights you need to guide your marketing to success.

You just need someone to show you how.

We begin each engagement with facilitation to help our clients document the insights about their customer, their products and services, their brand, and their vision that will provide a solid foundation for their marketing. Where necessary, we help our clients improve those insights so that the message they formulate is more robust.

The resulting strategy is often the first time our clients have documented the essentials of how they create a customer. Seeing their implicit assumptions in black and white for the first time often pays big dividends in their business.

For one thing, documenting these key assumptions often results in stimulating creative breakthroughs in the business. I have had facilitation sessions lead to developments in the sales process, customer service, and even new product plans. Only when they're made clear is it possible to spot gaps and opportunities present in the previously amorphous assumptions of principal stakeholders.

Having a strategy that documents a brand's core insights and messages also often gives an organization a jolt of energy. I've had many clients who report that the documented vision inspired employees throughout the organization as, often for the first time, they were able to connect their day-to-day jobs to the needs of their customers and the values and vision of the business.

Perhaps most importantly, the messaging strategy becomes a tool that ensures the entrepreneur's vision contributes comprehensively to inspire and guide an organization's marketing from the start, while providing a buffer against the kind of micromanagement and frequent changes in direction that can often discourage agencies and internal marketers in ways that prevent them from doing their best work. As a result, the marketing produced is often simultaneously more creative and a more accurate reflection of the organization's vision.