February 10, 2025

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What’s Ailing Your Marketing Programs: It’s The Message, Stupid

What’s Ailing Your Marketing Programs: It’s The Message, Stupid

Joe Garber is Chief Marketing Officer at Kainos Consulting, a management consulting firm that serves a variety of client needs worldwide.

On the surface, marketing is getting more complex every day. With a seemingly endless supply of tools and advice from experts routinely filling your inbox, it’s easy to get lost in the noise.

A leadership team may look at a slowing pipeline and understandably ask numerous questions. Are there gaps in our martech stack? Perhaps. Is sales not following up on every single marketing-qualified lead? Likely. Are programs not integrated enough to attain the magic number of touches in order to drive a potential buyer to act? Almost certainly.

As a marketing executive, I’ve been called upon many times in my career to diagnose the problems with existing plans and processes and then take action to update and evolve. Particularly when an organization is taking the next leap in its evolution, there are often glaring errors that your leadership, investors or even board want to fix right away.

Under those circumstances, it’s easy to get caught in the trap of looking for quick wins.

The Simple Truth: It’s The Message, Stupid

Before you jump into the weeds and/or start shuffling the deck on tactics, which can add further complexity to your marketing strategy, take a step back and ask yourself what underpins all of your marketing outreach—and start there.

Veterans of U.S. politics—regardless of what side you support—will be familiar with James Carville’s 1992 mantra: “It’s the economy, stupid.” As a campaign strategist, he was looking for a clean way to keep his team focused on what would most effectively drive voters to take the action that he advocated. Among all the levers at his disposal, the economy was foundational. Without getting the core right, all other efforts to reach his audience would be lacking.

Getting marketing right starts with a similar kernel: It’s the message, stupid.

This simple concept is crucial to driving the action you want in terms of filling and progressing the funnel. Once you have that nailed down, then other marketing initiatives—like evolving your website, generating awareness, building a content strategy and establishing a cadence for digital marketing—will naturally flow from there.

Phase One: Seeing The Big Picture

Starting with messaging as the bedrock of an enhanced marketing strategy is elementary in concept, but roadblocks can stand in your way. How often have you seen founders create a simple tagline and assume the messaging work is done? How often is product marketing the forgotten child or separated from the rest of marketing? Or how often is positioning driven by the development team who are so in love with the product capabilities that technical snapshots and demos serve as the de facto narrative?

If you’ve attended almost any marketing-related webinar over the past several months, you know that the ideal customer profile (ICP) is a trending topic in most boardrooms. Marketing executives are being peppered with questions about ICP almost every time they present in today’s environment—and for good reason. Knowing who you are marketing to is the first stage in establishing sound messaging, but more steps are necessary.

It’s up to you as a marketing leader to help the rest of your leadership team see the remaining gaps, then advance the messaging exercise further.

Phase Two: Investing In The Story

I’ve been fortunate to have embarked on numerous corporate re-messaging projects in my career, many times with the benefit of an experienced agency at the lead. The first steps tend to be pretty consistent (but important): interviewing executives, customers, partners and thought leaders on key points, then organizing the information in a way that bubbles the most salient points to the top.

The good ones then look at the message through the eyes of the ICP—identifying clear use cases where our products/services can be used, calling out where these use cases are not well solved today and then highlighting how we can solve the problem in a differentiated manner. The side benefit of this approach is that it forces you to focus less on the “how” and the “what” and more on the “why.”

The great ones then take that differentiated set of outcomes and deliver it as a story. A handful of slides, first focusing on evolving market dynamics and related risks to a potential customer, followed by an evolved set of buying criteria, frame the first part of the story. How your product can uniquely address those criteria and what that will mean in terms of cost, risk and scale frame the second half. If done right, your story can be told in 20 minutes.

Phase Three: Packaging For Consistency

Building a simple messaging framework deck isn’t the final step in resetting the foundation of your marketing strategy, however. You now need to test and re-test it to ensure you haven’t missed something important. Once you feel you’re done, do it again.

Armed with appropriate market insights, you can—at least for the foreseeable future—call if final and codify it in a message house that can be used by members of the marketing and extended team as they build out supporting content and assets for your marketing plan.

With this as a linchpin of your marketing plan and outreach, and supported by ongoing enablement, you can rest assured that you not only have the right message but also that it is being delivered consistently through all your channels.

Conclusion

Marketing isn’t hard if you don’t make it out to be. Yes, there are numerous tactical (and even strategic) elements to orchestrate—often over large teams and on a global scale. But if you come to terms with the Carvallian concept that “it’s the message, stupid,” you can prop up the long pole first, which makes everything that follows much simpler.

To do so, make sure you help others see the realities of your message, invest in storytelling and then package it up for others across the organization to consume with consistency.


Forbes Communications Council is an invitation-only community for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. Do I qualify?


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