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Your Marketing Department is Not Big Enough

Marketing Departments Can Not Go It Alone

I’m convinced that every marketing department is not big enough. No, I’m not advocating for bigger marketing departments. My goal is to help marketers recruit internal brand evangelists. Here’s why it’s mission critical to every marketing department.

MARKETers are not domain experts

In most businesses (and non profits, also referred to as businesses in this context), the marketing department staff is not comprised of people with deep expertise in the business. Marketing staff should generally have strong planning, communication and technology skills. In this age of content marketing, it’s not realistic for a business to expect the marketing staff to create every experience for their intended audience. The marketing staff simply doesn’t have the domain expertise in all aspects of a business to make this a reality. 

Effective Marketing is Driven by Relevant Content

The lines between advertising, promotion and content marketing are blurring. Is WillItBlend content marketing or advertising? Are SuperBowl ads content or just advertisements? Some would argue that at a cost of $4M per spot they are advertising. Then why do brands such as Volkswagen share their Get Happy commercial prior to the SuperBowl on Facebook and YouTube? Specifically, Volkswagen invites you to view this content prior to the SuperBowl. Why do brands do this? For maximum reach, but…

Marketing Departments Can Not Maximize Reach

Let me guess, your budget didn’t allow you to advertise in the SuperBowl, right? So how do the rest of us reach our desired audience? Even brands with enough budget to advertise in a large media event like the SuperBowl want to maximize reach. The fact is no marketing department is big enough to reach its intended audience to the extent it would like. Both B2B and B2C marketers want to reach their audience in an environment where the audience has complete control over where and when we consume content. No matter how smart or hard working a marketing department is, it’s just not possible to reach everyone through the efforts of the marketing department alone.

Cooperation by INTERNAL Domain Experts IS A MUST

On August 28, 1963 the late, great Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to more than 200,000 supporters of the civil rights movement. Dr. King’s team of civl rights evangelists was relatively small. They didn’t have an advertising budget to promote this event. They didn’t have a PR agency lining up the national media. Instead, they inspired the “domain experts” on this topic to spread the word using low tech, non-internet based word-of-mouth marketing. Some may argue that this event as an example of marketing is not relevant because it is emotionally charged, and not pertaining to a product. There is some truth to that. But, consider that when the true domain experts in a business lack passion for sharing their domain expertise, they handicap the marketing efforts of the business. The challenge for any business is to turn subject matter experts into passionate brand evangelists.

I’ve said many times that marketing is not a department. I want business executives to embrace this so that they empower the marketing staff to develop a content marketing plan that leverages the domain expertise of its employees. I want the domain experts spread across various departments in a business to share their expertise with their customers, partners, employees, suppliers and other relevant constituents who have interest in their content for the simple reason that the marketing department is not big enough to go it alone.

Whether a business has 5 or 50,000 employees it can not staff a big enough marketing department. To reach its marketing potential each business must achieve passion among its domain experts and become a social business. When businesses achieve this mindset, reaching your marketing potentials are possible.

 

 

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