Marketing Is Much Bigger Than Communications

One of my frustrations with the word marketing is how often it is used as another word for communications.

Someone needs a poster, so they go to marketing. A social media post needs publishing, so it goes to marketing. There is an event next week and someone suddenly realises it needs promoting, so marketing gets involved. Before long, the marketing function becomes an internal production studio servicing everybody else's requests.

Communications are obviously part of marketing. I have spent a huge part of my career working across websites, social media, email, PR, design, video and content, and I still love that side of the job. What I increasingly recognise, however, is that communications are only one part of a much bigger commercial discipline.

Marketing should be involved in deciding who the customer is, understanding what they want, developing the proposition, considering the product, setting or influencing pricing, identifying how something will be distributed and then deciding how it should be communicated. By the time somebody says “we need an Instagram post”, a huge number of marketing decisions have potentially already been made without the marketer being in the room.

I saw this clearly through my work at Aberystwyth Town. Building a new website was technically a communications project, but the most valuable questions were not about fonts, images or page layouts. We had to think about ticketing, memberships, sponsorship, hospitality, events, merchandise and customer data.

That changed the website from something that simply communicated information into something capable of generating revenue and building a customer base. Within its first four weeks, more than £2,200 had gone through it and more than 150 customer records had been created, compared with around 110 over the previous 12 months.

The interesting part of that example is that the design of the website was probably the least strategically significant element. What mattered was what people could actually do once they arrived there.

I see the same principle in projects like The Gym and Mama Fay's. You can build a visually impressive website for a gym, but if a prospective member cannot understand the proposition, see the classes and easily take the next step, the website has failed commercially. A restaurant can have fantastic photography, but marketing also needs to consider the menu, price, experience, location, booking process and reason somebody would choose it over dozens of alternatives.

This is why I want marketers involved earlier.

We should be asking questions before the product is finished, before the event is organised and before the price has been decided. We should be helping organisations understand the market rather than simply being asked to tell the market what the organisation has already decided.

Perhaps the biggest change in my own career is that I still love making things, but I am increasingly interested in being involved in deciding what is worth making in the first place.

That, to me, is marketing.