Marketing is Like Flocking Birds

There are three things about marketing.:

1. ​Sometimes, marketing works.
2. Marketing is like flocking birds.
3. There are more than three things about marketing.

I've been in marketing for a big chunk of my life, and often when I work with small or scaling companies, I'm approached for marketing help because a company thinks they have a marketing problem. But often, they don't. 

Marketing is like flocking birds. You wave your arms in the air and yell, to grab the attention of birds flying by. "Hey! Over here!" And if the marketing works, the bird flocking works.

One or a few at a time, you grab the attention of some birds, through ads, or campaigns or promotions, and then direct the birds to go do something. "Fly over here and buy this thing! Fill out this form!"

When I started at one startup as the Marketing Director, where I had been hired to solve marketing problems, I inherited a marketing plan and budget that was spending a LOT of money to flock birds, and the effort was pretty successful. Birds by the hundreds, and then by the thousands, were being targeted, waved over, grouped together into big incoming flocks ... and then aimed directly into a brick wall.

They were hitting the wall and landing on the ground with a thud. Our problem wasn't a marketing problem -- we were paying through the nose for it, but the marketing was working, and we were finding and directing leads like gangbusters. But the rest of the business wasn't prepared to handle them properly.

So I hit pause on the bird flocking campaigns, and got up from my chair, and went to see where the birds were hitting. The problem was that our sign up process was completely broken. Too many steps, manual processes, a complicated trial offer. So I worked with the customer service team to cut a hole in the wall so that the birds could find their way in, and then turned on the bird flocking machine again.

The birds were gathered, grouped, flocked and aimed -- straight through the window we had cut into the wall!

Where they abruptly hit another wall, that was standing in behind the first wall.

So I hit pause on the marketing, got up from my chair, and then went to talk to the product team, as well as some of the customers who were churning out and hitting the second wall. We ran an NPS survey and found out our product, which we loved dearly, had some serious problems. Some were legitimate bugs, others were simply misconceptions on expected functionality, but that's really no different than a bug to a customer.

So again, we fixed those problems and cut another hole in the wall. Again, I started back up with the bird flocking, and again: through the second window, and into the third wall.

You can see the pattern here. There were a series of walls, and holes, one after the other. None of them had much to do with marketing, aside from the fact that the marketing had actually been working. After the product wall there was a service coverage wall, then a channel distribution wall and a sales lead management wall. But eventually, we did manage to cut holes in the walls all the way through into the business, where happy birds found a place to thrive, and stay. Our churn dropped to almost zero, our ARR kept growing at a steady and predictable pace, and we were in business.

After all of that, and that took quite a while, I was finally able to do some capitol M Marketing. I cranked the flocking machine back up and was able to see that we were actually spending too much to flock these birds to begin with, and that some of the birds weren't the right birds at all -- but by that time I was in a position to understand our funnel health and make refinements to the plan that lowered our MQL costs, increased our conversion rates, and drove sustainable revenue. And then we did some serious funnel filling.

But I had to get out of my chair many, many times to help resolve the non-marketing problems that were preventing our marketing investment from really driving the business in a fundamental way. It's those intersections, in between marketing, sales, product management, customer success and operations, where a company with a smart, collaborative and ego-less team can cut holes in walls and keep driving the business forward.

What are the walls in your business, where the birds are hitting (or not hitting at all) and where do you need to cut holes? Do you really need to drop money into an inbound campaign right now, or do you need just one specialized outbound sales rep? Do you need to be focused on feature development, or do you have a customer profile problem? Are you trying to solve a marketing problem by applying a sales solution, or vice versa?

That's the fun part of scaling a business, and I'd love to help you figure that out. 

-- Doug