Everyone in Your Organization Should Understand Marketing
People tend to incorrectly equate marketing with advertising – and believe that marketing is just this thing that some slick cologne-splashed creative types do in order to get people to notice an organization and its products or services. Although I’m not big on cologne, the rest of the stereotype certainly includes a key facet of marketing, but marketing has a greater purpose that often goes unappreciated or unnoticed by most.
Marketing Defined
The primary function of marketing is to align every aspect of a company’s operations towards a common end (a value proposition) in mind – marketing is the glue that unites every person in the organization into a purposeful unit.
SmartDraw’s primary organizational goal, also known as its value proposition, is to make the task of communicating visually as easy and convenient as possible. That’s why our product development team spends so much time testing and improving the product’s user interface, why we have a well-trained in-house customer support team, and why our marketing communications team builds so many screencasts and eCourses to help explain the product and its concepts to users and non-users alike.
Our organization’s marketing aligns all of our operations towards achieving this common goal. Even though many people in our organization are not “marketers,” they are all an important part of the “marketing” of the organization.
If we didn’t have a good customer service unit to help augment the ease-of-use of SmartDraw, then our product would effectively be less usable, customers would stop giving us return business, and our bottom line would suffer as a result. It also would be much more difficult for us to achieve our goal of providing the world’s easiest and most complete visual communication software. Whether our customer service people know it or not, they too are marketers who help us achieve our goals and sell product.
Everyone Should Know Their Role
Everybody in your organization is a part of your organization’s marketing efforts, whether they know it or not. The trouble is that they should know it. If someone doesn’t understand how their work helps the organization achieve its value proposition, then they probably aren’t being as effective as they could be.
Everyone from the System Administrator to the Shipping Clerk needs to understand how their work helps the organization advance – they need to understand their organization’s value proposition and how their work fulfills it. If they don’t understand, then they are much more likely to make counter-productive decisions which ultimately hurt your organization’s ability to meet its goals.
When someone can’t see the forest from the trees, they’re much more likely to get lost. So here’s how you can help your co-workers find their way:
- Ask “what is our organization’s ultimate goal?” If their answer is out-of-sync with what you perceive the goal to be, then find out why.
- Ask “how does your work help us advance this goal?” If they aren’t sure, then come prepared with an answer for them.
It’s not rocket science – it’s just a reminder. Help your team understand how exactly their work impacts the bottom line and they will not only make less counter-productive choices, but they will also see and appreciate the value of their own work.
Update:
If you'd like to try SmartDraw, you can download a free trial of SmartDraw here.
If you liked this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.
