Wait – are you still just running campaigns to try and win new business?
Why you need marketing capability, not just noisy promotions.
Marketing capability – it’s the one thing most businesses need. Known for delivering consistent growth and opportunities for scale, it is still often (and somewhat ironically) overshadowed by campaigns.
A campaign is spending money on ads or promotions. It can be an event or experience. It’s about creating noise and hoping your audience will catch on, see the commotion, consider your core message and want to take the next step – be that develop an affinity for your brand, go to your website, make an enquiry, or the holy grail, make a purchase.
A campaign can be assessed. Celebrated when it drives results, or ‘worth a go’ if it doesn’t. A campaign is arguably more tangible simply because it attends to the ego’s need to see its brand in market. No judgement. We’ve all been there. It’s that moment you see your brand in market, and you think, yeah, this should do it.
And sometimes it does ‘do it’. A campaign brings in a few new sales. A handful of leads. Maybe some new contacts. More eyeballs to your website. Heck, done well, if you hit the influencer jackpot, a good campaign might transform your business.
For a while. Until you find yourself scrambling to catch up because something as innocuous as a distribution system derails your previously flawless customer service rating.
Spikes in sales are rewarding. But what if you could repeatedly and predictably generate demand, independent of any single campaign?
What if marketing went from something you did when sales were slow to part of how decisions are made? Or if campaigns went from being a life raft to an accelerator. If, rather than hoping for a result, you could intentionally drive an outcome through thoughtful experimentation (not just guesswork).
That’s what building marketing capability within your business can do. It’s a framework to follow. A structural ability to do marketing well, over and over. It takes time (sure) and quite likely some investment to develop, yet time and again, successful brands have proven the value of that investment by demonstrably outperforming competitors, even in a downturn.
So what exactly is marketing capability?
- Strategic clarity – clear positioning, a defined target audience, a strong differentiated value proposition and a consistent messaging platform. Being clear on who you are, what you stand for and what you bring to the market should be the anchor point for all marketing.
- Systems and processes – this doesn’t have to be the most advanced marketing technology stack for it to work. A simple set of agreed principles and processes can fundamentally shift an organisation’s marketing capability. Implementing a campaign planning process, or adding discipline to your content calendar, can reduce the mental load of thinking about how or what to do. It can also increase the likelihood of success of an action because a process, by definition, requires reflection and optimisation. Every time you go to market using a set process as your base, you begin to increase your chances of success markedly.
- Data and feedback loops – you’ll see it everywhere, data is king. It has been since the noughties (ok let’s admit it, even earlier). Even in the snail mail direct marketing days, we were tracking data and creating feedback loops so we could better track cost per lead, conversion rates, customer lifetime value and insights that might direct our next move. Today, there’s a plethora of data available through digital channels. Without strategic clarity, though, and a marketing framework that knows how to look for the right insights, that data can become overwhelming and insufficient in its impact.
- Internal ownership – who owns marketing in your organisation? For most SME’s, the answer is the owner, admin or ‘we have this [person] who is really good on Canva, and so we get to help out from time to time’. It’s someone’s job but also no one’s job and so marketing becomes a bolt on – aka, back to that life-raft. Developing marketing as a capability requires someone to be accountable for the marketing outcomes – brand positioning, filling the pipeline with quality, consistent leads, and matching brand to commercial outcomes. And so the list goes on.
- Building a brand platform – in our business, we often refer to this as the Coca-Cola effect. In almost any country in the world, you can see that red, that font, and you can immediately imagine the sensation of those cold cola bubbles as they cascade down your parched little traveller throat. The reason we can imagine that sensation so vividly? Exposure. And it’s intentional. Coke has systematically stayed loyal to and embedded a consistent tone, narrative and visual identity over decades. You can’t help but associate those tiny brand markers with the story you have been told about how Coke should make you feel, and the known experience of the product itself. Other brands, like Apple, build iconic campaigns derived from obsessive marketing positioning, a clear narrative and a complete commitment to delivering what they know the customer wants. In Apple’s case, this is exceptional design, strong retail experiences and unique product definition.
Capability is not more ads. It’s not hiring a bigger, brighter agency (not yet anyway – they do have their place!) And it’s not rebranding every couple of years to create more noise in market. It’s about leverage.
Building marketing as a core function within your business so you can build commercial strategy that understands what a good customer looks like (and how to connect with them). That delivers your business repeatable growth. And that enables your brand to grow a strong reputation in market. That is marketing capability: it’s growth by design. Not by accident.