How important is marketing

If your product or service is the body of your business, marketing will be the water.

Any business in the world needs marketing. You could sell the best product out there. If no one heard about it, you will never sell it. If yours competitors have lower quality products but a better marketing, they will get more clients than you.

Marketing is what glue your clients to your product or service.

The rule number one is to never neglict marketing, period.

The 3 rules of the Open Marketing Pirate

1 - Only measure what matters

As an Open Marketing Pirate, we don't care about vanished metrics used by marketers to confuse their clients. We only want to focus on what matters. We only focus on metrics that indicate growth. In other way, this is mainly 1 or 2 key metrics.

2 - Avoid the Short Term Trap

Most marketers are victims of what we call the "Short Term Trap" because of the pressure of clients, managers and leadership. They want marketers to find metrics to justify whatever about the campaign. "We need to share something with the client" or "I need to know why the campaign is not generating leads, we've started 2 days ago."

They made quick conclusions because of the metric obsession:

• Oh! The number of clicks has grown so the ad is great!
• The increase of the conversion rate is thanks to effectiveness of the landing page.
• The number of visits rises, so the new menu is appealing. But is that really the case?

Let me tell you an anecdote. A chain of restaurant ran a campaign for one of their restaurant in a specific city. The campaign has generated lots of impressions. The visit rate has blown. They were sure, the ad performed more than expected. However, at the same time, they were an event in their area during that week. They benefit from that event and get a lot of traffic. But their marketing agency said that footfall griwth was thanks to the media campaign.

Great marketing needs time. An Open Marketing Pirate prefer long term over short term. We know that long term is necessary to build relationship. And good relationship leads to loyal client. Period.

An Open Marketing Pirate prefer to generate less leads to get high close rate. We know that generating tons of leads could decrease the close rate. In that case, most of the generated leads were not qualified. This could impact marketing and sales plans.

3 - Consistency, Relevance and Transparency

Building solid relationship with leads requires trust. Trust is the outcome of Consistency, Relevance, and Transparency. You need to create a real value to your customer. Be consistent in relevance. Relevance means be there when your customer needs you. Be the answer when your customer has a question. Be at the right place, at the right time.