“Marketing is anything that helps or hinders sales or use of products and services.”
These words are from Terri Langhans, whom I heard speak at an ASAE conference a while back. This is her definition of what “marketing” is, and I think it’s dead on.
Marketing is not a function limited to the marketing department, the membership department, or some marketing program. Marketing is everything we do as an organization that helps or hinders our members and customers. Where does this apply? Everywhere. Some simple examples:
- Does your online presence help or hinder sales or use of products? Is it easy, difficult, or impossible for your members and customers to join, renew, register for events, and buy products from you?
- When someone calls your organization, are they serviced quickly and appropriately by pleasant staff? Or are they passed off with “I don’t handle those questions, you’ll have to contact another department”?
- Does your database and your data help you to better serve your customers, and better communicate with them? Or does it get in the way of providing outstanding service?
Simply, marketing is everything you do. So you need to be sure you’ve got systems and processes in place to manage all of these “touchpoints.”
So how are you and your organization doing with your “marketing”?
Wes — Thanks for your post and thinking about marketing. My only concern with this definition of markekting is that if marketing is everything then it may become nothing. Yes every organization should answer the phone and have a clean database, but these are foundational for any business. If this is all an organization does, I would not consider them to be marketers. Tony
Tony, that’s a fair observation, but I don’t think I suggested that if the only thing an org does is answer the phone and manage their database that they are marketing. The greater point is that if marketing is only the domain of the marketing department (or whomever) it won’t be nearly as effective as when an organization pays attention to ALL aspects of its customer interactions.
Wes — Good point. But you and I have worked in this field long enough to know that proper use of databases and lack of marketing are perhaps the two biggest constraints on growth for associations. So when you list the three items above and ask, “How are you doing with your marketing?” I get very concerned. Giving an organization a “pass” for doing the very basics of staying in business does not serve them. Tony
Fair enough. My three points were just examples for illustration; associations need to do a lot more that just this, of course.