Why Can’t Marketers Just Explain What They Do in a Way That Makes Sense?

Great, you’re a ‘marketer’ but what does that actually mean?

I’m sure many of you have walked away from a long-winded marketing meeting, scratching your head wondering exactly that.

We are all confused because marketing, as an industry, is in transition.

Think back to days gone by when if you had a health concern you would go to the doctor for treatment, no matter what area of your body was aching. Switch now to the present, we know that for a sore foot we visit a podiatrist, a rash on our body, we visit a dermatologist and a cardiologist for our heart, the list goes on…

Where marketing used to be a generalised term and service, we’re now witnessing a breakdown of this once all-encompassing ‘power beast’ into more specialised fragments. And naturally, within these fragments, specialists demand that their specific area of marketing is more important to your business’s ongoing success than any other.

While these fragments of marketing are becoming more and more common, marketing managers and in-house marketing functions are still expected to be masters of all such domains.

We’ve clumped everything together and called it “marketing”

But is it really realistic to expect that a person or function within your business, that was once employed to ‘grab attention in the marketplace’ is also adequately skilled to do all of the following:

• SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
• SEM (Search Engine Marketing)
• Website Design/Development
• Graphic design
• Public relations
• Advertising
• Social media
• Branding
• And that’s just on page one….

If we had to put our house on it, we’d say no. A marketer with advertising expertise probably isn’t going to be that great at website development, and a PR whizz probably isn’t that flash at graphic design. And when you break down each of these functions further, take design for example, does that mean you know how to design a website, and graphic design, and social media campaigns, and branding elements, and EDMs, and then actually bring them to life by building them? And that’s just one example.

The job spec for today’s marketer is incredibly blurred and complicated, to say the least, and that’s why you may feel as confused as the marketer themselves when you walk out of those meetings…

Marketers and business owners alike are expected to be “experts” in skills they don’t have.

Marketing as a function seems to have shifted from simply ‘grabbing attention’, when there was only TV, billboards, radio and press ads to play with, to ‘building a connection’ using those same ‘traditional’ vehicles PLUS the ‘interactive’ channels we’ve ALL come to rely so heavily on: social media and the almighty internet.

So it appears as though the role of marketing is evolving, much like it did with medicine a while back. We’re transitioning through to a period of hopeful clarity and realistic expectations for the almighty marketer. Bear with your in-house marketing team while they find their feet through this phase (it’s safe to assume they are doing what they can) and know that the team at Rock Solid Marketing is here to help. With specialists in SEO, Google Ads, PR, design and web development, our Rock Solid Marketing crew can be an extension of yours in this time of transition.