How marketing is more than just happiness

“Success comes from standing out, not fitting in.”

Don Draper

Not all marketing is advertising but all advertising is marketing.

Let me explain.

Marketing is the process of finding, managing, and selling to a specific target audience. A marketing role incorporates parts of sales and customer success. It combines sales’ selling the product and customer success’ understanding the product and customer experience.

But it still retains an individual identity.

It determines who to target and how to target them. Advertising is how you promote your product and your message to best target a desired audience.

The CMO of MySentio Chad Troutman says it best: “Give me a $100,000 budget and watch me turn it into a $300,000 profit.”

According to advertising expert Don Draper, the fictitious character on the historical television show Mad Men, “Advertising is based on one thing: happiness. And do you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It’s freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of a road that screams with reassurance that whatever you’re doing is OK. You are OK.”

I’ll amend his statement for marketing:

Marketing is based on one thing: understanding. Understanding your product, its value, who benefits from it, and how to reach these people. Specifically:

What does the product do?
What pain does it solve?
Who has this pain?
How do I show my product as a solution to their pain?

Marketing is searching for those in the most pain and helping them out. It provides happiness in that it takes someone from frustration to being content and potentially makes them happy. But before you change someone’s situation you need to understand who your niche is, where they are, and how to reach them.

A marketing campaign whose audience is everyone, targets no one.

Even the best multi-use products with the largest audiences have a target ‘niche’ audience. Before starting a campaign, you must know who your niche is. Would a medical equipment company place a billboard outside a prison or setup a booth at a history convention? Of course not. They go to medical conventions, directly to hospitals, and likely replace a billboard with an operational video.

It doesn’t matter who can buy it but who wants to buy it.

Once you identify your niche, next is finding where they are and how to reach them. There will always be people who come to you looking for a solution but more likely than not it is up to marketing to find these people and find their pain. As the wise Don once said “What you call love was invented by guys like me… to sell Nylons.”

The digital era has made finding, targeting, and gathering data about and audience easier and more efficient. One can place digital ads on websites (such as Google Ads), applications (Facebook Ads), or through commercials.

You can set demographic limitations on your digital ads, divide your audience into sub audiences and target them according to their preferences. Also, you can set email campaign automations (such as sending daily, weekly, or monthly emails using Mailchimp) and see how people interact with your campaign, app, or website using a customer analytics tool ( like Google Analytics).

But marketing is not only about knowing how to use the new but the old as well.

A scooter company targeting the elderly would not heavily advertise on social media because their audience largely is not there. Television, radio, newspapers, or magazines are better mediums to reach their audiences.

Broadly, marketing roles require being knowledgeable on the product and people. Understanding generation, sex, preferences, actions, time, geographic, and value differences (to name a few) are all musts.

You need to start wide and end narrow.

At each stage you narrow, understand why some people are included and others excluded. That way once you expand your audience, you understand why a previous demographic was excluded and find ways to target them differently.

Marketing is testing to see what works versus what doesn’t and coming up with solutions to fix whatever doesn’t work.

Lastly, here are a few great traits and tools to help you market those seeking happiness:

1. Good communication skills (both verbal and written).
2. Planning.
3. Designing and creativity.
4. Digital marketing tools (Mailchimp, Facebook Ads Manager, Google Analytics).
5. Traditional marketing skills (booth marketing).
6. Learning never ends.
7. Own your mistakes.