Video Transcription
For a lot of people, especially business leaders that aren’t marketers, when they hear the word marketing, it can conjure up a whole lot of different kinds of feelings and responses.
For instance, maybe some of these visuals resonate with you. If marketing feels to you like you’re just throwing spaghetti at the wall. If it feels like marketing is just this big black hole that you throw your money into and hope that something good comes out the other side. If marketing feels like you’re just placing bets and you’re crossing your fingers and hoping for good outcomes, or that your marketing people are just running around chasing shiny objects based on what leadership or sales might be asking for at the moment, or perhaps like somebody I spoke with recently, marketing has become a four letter word.
It’s just been so painful and so frustrating and they’ve taken so many swings at it and they just don’t have the confidence that it’s going to take them where they need to go. And so if you’re experiencing any of these kinds of feelings, it means that you’ve experienced random acts of marketing. And that’s what we as an organization are so excited to help you overcome. So let’s take a look at what some of that comes from, where the background of that is from and how we move forward.
So it’s a really common story that most entrepreneurial businesses begin as founder-led. They begin as sales driven. Because until you have sold something and can demonstrate that you can sell it on a repeat basis, you don’t really have a business. So it’s really natural to be a founder-led, sales-driven organization.
And then to be able to sell, you have to have a story and a message and collateral and information. But you might not yet have found that perfect niche, the perfect fit, or defined exactly how your business is growing. So often those initial pieces of marketing, collateral and information are, they’re changing shape a lot. They’re trying to find that position. So it’s really natural that initially marketing isn’t very well set. It’s not super strategic, it’s a little bit more reactive and it’s sales driven. And so your business eventually hits this operating critical mass. You finally kind of find your swim lane, you’re ready to grow beyond where you’ve been. And that’s the time when it’s really important to get strategic with marketing.
That’s the moment at which a lot of business leaders look around and realize everything we’ve done so far is pretty random and we really need to orchestrate this differently. So that’s a really common shared experience, and that is really the experience out of which Authentic was born. I myself grew up in a fast growing entrepreneurial company, where first I was a seller, and then I became the first sales manager. And I had marketing responsibility, but that just really meant our company had a website. And eventually, as the firm grew further, we really needed to build strategic marketing. And that’s when I started to, through trial and error, through random acts of marketing, learn what marketing was, and eventually built the rest of my career in marketing before starting Authentic.
And so today, like I said, we’re working with businesses of all types and sizes, walking with them on this journey, helping them to build from the foundation of everything they’re doing so well, and then organize their marketing efforts so they’re much more strategic and much more aligned.
