Artisan vs. Manufacturing Approach to Marketing

The challenge with Marketing these days starts right from when the kids come out of school having graduated fresh from the marketing program at the local college or institution of their choice.  Having interviewed a number of Marketing School Graduates it amazes me how ill prepared some of them are from a technology perspective and how immature their view of what marketing should be.  Marketing is heavily digital these days involving a heavy reliance on Content Management Systems, Email Marketing Tools and CRM systems.  Yet many Marketing Graduates have little to no practical experience in these areas.  Good Data Quality and Data Cleansing Strategies are typically just as important as what your Creative Strategy is going to be for a particular campaign.  Yet again schools spend very little time on these nuts and bolts of Marketing which we all have to deal with whether we like it or not.  Rather Marketing Schools fill their graduates minds with visions that they are going to be involved in the creative of the next product launch for Coca Cola or Microsoft as soon as they graduate.  Which is likely not the case.  At least not within the first few years of graduation.

Really this all relates back to a core shift that needs to happen in terms of the philosophy of how to approach marketing.  This shift needs to start at the local Marketing education programs and move out into industry from there. 

Artisan vs. a Manufacturing Approach to Marketing - A Fundamental Change in the Philosophy of what a Good Marketing is. 

Now there is no doubt in my mind that all good marketers should have a creative streak in them.  Any content produced should look innovative, professional, fresh and thoughtful.  But the challenge is that most marketers approach each new task as a complete new project with all the content unique to that project.  Everything they deliver they consider to be unique. This is the "Artisan" way of Marketing.  Sitting in the corner chipping away to create that next statue of David. This is what they've been taught in school.  A classical example of this is the conference event.  The marketer registers for the conference event as a one off, generates unique offers and programs for that event, the event is executed, may or may not be successful and then all the content that is generated is filed most of which is never used again.  The problem in this example is that you are getting no economies of scale.  Each activity is generated uniquely.  Sure the Marketer gets that feeling of satisfaction about what they've created but because everything is unique to each event there are no efficiencies and the effort to generate those "Impressions" or "Leads" that every marketer is chasing is huge. 

Now my suggestion is that Marketers should approach what they do as a "Manufacturer".  The goal being to have standard processes, high level of automation and to reuse as much of the content they produce as possible.  To me the Manufacturing Approach to Marketing means...

1. Avoid the big one off events.  If you do have to do events make as much of the content reusable as possible.  Have standard formats, standard email templates, standard marketing collateral that you use over and over again.
2. Focus on Digital Marketing.  Aside from the fact that Digital Marketing has the benefit of being more targeted it also allows you to build once and use many times.  The website you build or the YouTube video you create can reach many more interested parties that the one off Marketing Event that had a few hundred people participate.
3. Increase the Use of Technology to Improve and Automate the Process.  Use CRM Systems, EMail Marketing Systems and Content Management systems that allow you to have standard templates to reduce the time.  Focus on using automated Workflows and Customer Experience Maps that allow you automate much of your interactions with your target audience.  Marketers need to get comfortable with the use of technology.  Being able to write work flows or generate complex data queries needs to be as natural to them as breathing. 
4. Having a Standard Approach to New Offers.  Everyone in every industry comes out periodically with new pricing offers or new packages trying to entice customer to buy and give them a compelling event.  If you are going to produce new offers have a standard process for creating them and have a regular cadence as to how they are released out into market. 
5. If you are going to run events do smaller ones.  Rather than do a one off event think about doing the Events as a Series.  Don't do one webinar, do a regular schedule of webinars.  Do a series of the same event but in many different geographic locations or do a number of similar events based on a theme with slightly different content. Finally and most importantly...
6. Every time you start a new campaign ask yourself the question "How can I make this repeatable?".  What can I do to apply a build once use many times approach?     

Henry Ford proved that the Assembly Line was much more effective than the individual work stations.  Marketers need to learn this lesson that was learned in other components of business almost a century ago.  Their job is not to create the statue of David but to build an assembly line that allows them to create as many impressions or leads as possible with the ever decreasing budgets they are being faced with.    Volume and efficiency wins out over creativity these days.  It has to.

David Goad is the Managing Director for eSavvy – Microsoft Dynamics CRM Gold Certified Partner. eSavvy is an award winning Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partner staffed by some of the most experienced solution and technical architects in the Microsoft partner channel. We build and deliver relationship management solutions based on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform for large enterprises as well small and midsize businesses in Australia.