How to build a marketing management system
A lecture for Young Business Club, a community of entrepreneurs and business owners.
A marketing department starts with a business goal
At a Young Business Club meetup, DOGMA co-founder Davyd Gviniashvili unpacked a familiar story. A company hires a targeting specialist, an SMM manager, a designer and a PR contractor. Everyone is busy, reports arrive every month. Yet when the owner asks, “What has marketing changed in the business?”, nobody can answer.
Goal first, tools second
Social media, paid targeting and design are, on their own, simply marketing tools.
First, the business has to decide where it wants to get to: grow by 30%, enter a new market, raise margins or increase repeat purchases. Then marketing has to work out what will make that goal achievable. Do you need more new customers? A higher average order value? More frequent purchases? Or are half of your prospects simply getting lost between the inquiry and the payment? Perhaps you need to launch a new product to expand the market?
This is where marketing begins: product, price, customer journey, service, repeat purchases. Advertising is just one of the tools inside that system.
And one of the most expensive phrases here is “I feel like…”. I feel like customers buy on price. I feel like we need TikTok. I feel like the competitor is growing because of its ads.
Intuition can be right, but it’s better to test it with research, sales data, the CRM, the funnel, analytics and real conversations with customers.
Marketing still has to be managed
Even a good strategy changes something only when it is followed by goals, a budget, owners, deadlines and regular checks against results. A campaign delivered a ROAS of 3.4 — great. But then someone has to decide whether to scale it, change it or shut it down.
That is why headcount says little about the quality of a marketing department. Ten people can create chaos, while three people with the right contractors can deliver results.
Before your next hire, answer just three questions:
- Which business goal is marketing supporting right now?
- How does each area of work affect it?
- Who makes the call when the numbers diverge from the plan?
As long as even one of these questions lacks a clear answer, one more SMM manager is unlikely to solve the problem.
Read next
All posts →Marketing from the inside: a talk for teens at IT from the Inside Kiril Treitiak showed teenagers aged 14–17 how marketing works: from a poster in Krolevets to a VARUS.UA campaign and our own app, Remolo. How to implement a brand strategy In his Wizeclub lectures, Davyd Gviniashvili showed how to turn a brand strategy from a slide deck into a system that shapes communication, marketing and the business itself. How a brand adds value Why do similar products sell at very different prices? DOGMA co-founder Kiril Treitiak explains how a brand creates added value and why a brand starts with strategy.
