You vs. Leadership (How To Win Every Time)

Ever feel like you're playing tug of war with leadership about what marketing is and what you should do?

Here's the right way to think about it - and how you can win every time.

P.S. If you're looking, here are a few things to help you:

- Hang out with 20 marketing directors for 2 days in Orlando, FL at the Momentum conference. You'll walk away with a simple strategy that works, the skills, plan, and confidence to make it happen. ​Click here for details.​

- Download the Marketing Director Roadmap to get the one-page blueprint to succeeding as a marketing director.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

This is the Marketing Director Daily, and I'm Tim Parkin. Let's talk about leadership. And let's talk about you. I call this you versus leadership. And it's a common theme that I hear every day and every week as I talk to marketing directors. That you have ideas, you have thoughts, you have opinions about how to do marketing, about what success looks like, and what the company should do with its marketing resources. And at the same time, leadership has a different idea often about what marketing is, how marketing works, and what you should do as the leader of the company's marketing. So you versus leadership. It's the classic battle. And I'm tempted to ask you: whose opinion do you think matters more? Is it yours as the marketing leader, or is it leadership's opinion, the CEO's opinion of what marketing is and what it should be? And this is a trick question because it doesn't matter what you think about marketing, and it certainly doesn't matter what leadership thinks about marketing. The only person's opinion about marketing that actually matters is the customer. And I didn't understand this for a long time. You know, you've heard the saying the customer is always right. And I pushed back on that. That the customer can't always be right, that sometimes they're wrong. And I believe that's true, but I've realized recently I've misunderstood the saying this whole time. It's not about the customer being factually correct or accurate or justified. The customer is always right, means that how they act is what matters. The customer is right in what they do. And the only thing that matters in our marketing are the results that we get. And the results that we get are the result of what people do, what the customer does. That's why the customer really is always right. And that should be reassuring for us because it means it doesn't matter if you're right or wrong. It doesn't matter what you think or know. And it doesn't matter what leadership says or what they think. The only thing that matters is the customer and how they respond. And so I want to give you some advice here on how to use this to your advantage because a lot of marketing directors ask me, how do I communicate to leadership what marketing is, how marketing works, and what marketing should do. And they ask me, how should I deal with the changes and the demands that leadership is making about the marketing that we should be doing or the things and activities and efforts we should be pursuing as the marketing leader of the company. I think that all of this comes back to the customer. It's all about the customer and using them as a guiding light to direct, to guide, to shape and inform all of your marketing. And so I'll give you three scenarios here that I've seen. I'm going to tell you what most marketers do, then I'll tell you what some marketers do, and lastly, what the best marketers do. So first, what most marketers do is three steps. They make a plan, they think about some things to do, they decide, they prepare, then they do the marketing, they launch it, they publish it, they promote it, and then finally they see the response that the customer has. Did people click? Did they opt in? Did they buy from us? So they plan and they do and they see. And this is the traditional way that marketing is done. And it turns out it's actually the worst way to do marketing. And if you're doing it this way, that's okay. Listen up because I'm going to show you the right way to do marketing, a better way to do marketing. Because some marketers have gotten smarter, and what they've realized is rather than planning and then doing and then seeing, what if we do first do some marketing, then see how customers respond and what happens, and then make our plans to adjust and to learn and to improve. And this is certainly better than before, but there's still opportunity to do even better. So let me tell you what the best marketers do. The best marketers follow these three steps. First, they see how customers respond and engage and act. Then they make plans based on that, and then they do marketing that they know with confidence will work, will be effective. Because when you first see how customers respond and engage and react, and then you make your plans based on that, and then you do marketing afterwards, you have complete confidence that your marketing has the highest chances of success. And guess what? You look like a marketing genius because you've read the minds of your customers and you're actually giving people what they want. This isn't rocket science. It's actually really easy to do, and I'll give you some ways to figure out what customers are thinking and how they would respond and react so you can see first, then plan and then do. And just by following these three steps, you'll be way ahead of 99% of marketers, people who are doing marketing the traditional way and not the most effective way. So let's talk about how to do this. How do you see what customers are thinking and doing so that you can make your plans and do your marketing based on the customer? There's a lot of ways, but the first is user testing. This is huge. You can save a lot of time and a lot of money by testing and getting responses from users. So I'll tell you an example. One of my clients wanted to redo their website. And this is a common thing as a marketing director. You're in charge of the website and you often want to redo it because it's old, it's outdated, and it's bad. And he told me the website's bad, we want to fix it, we want to redesign it. It's going to be really expensive and it's going to take a lot of time. And so I asked him, what's wrong with the website? And he thought for a few minutes and didn't really have a good answer. And to be honest, it doesn't matter what the answer is, because what he thinks about the website doesn't matter. What leadership thinks about the website doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is what do actual customers or prospective customers think about the website. And so before spending time and money and effort redesigning and rebuilding the website, first we can screenshot the website, screenshot the competitor's website, and go and run a test and get in front of actual users, people who are ICP or who are interdemographic and ask them, what do you like about these sites? What do you not like about these sites? What would you change? What do you want to see? And we can ask them questions and get their feedback, their ideas, their observations about how we need to adjust our website, if at all, which things we should consider and which pieces are most important. You can see how doing this will save you so much time, but more importantly, it will also give you the data, the evidence, the ammunition that you need to go to leadership and say, this is what actual people, our users, are thinking, are saying, are doing. And if we made these changes, imagine how much more effective our marketing would be. So always see and then plan and then do. Never do and plan and see. Most marketers get this completely backwards. But now you know the secret, the answer, the right way, and the most effective way to approach all of your marketing. Put the customer first. And I've always said, I believe this is customer proximity, that whoever is closest to the customer wins. And that if we ignore what leadership is demanding of us, and if we set aside our thoughts and opinions and feelings about what marketing is and should be, and we put the customer first, if we get close to the customer, if we act in a way that shows that the customer is always right and we acknowledge that, then everything we do in marketing is a lot easier, a lot less stressful, and a lot more certain to actually work.