Marketing is not a black and white subject. What you do through the science and art of fulfilling your customers’ needs is a profit center. This means that other activities are costing you money, taking from you, but most of the time, they’re necessary to deliver your stuff. Proof of this is that marketing is part of a new age of delivering products and services that comes after the industrial age. This “make” ethos is still embedded in fields such as engineering, including computer engineering.

So far, so good, but even when these individuals see the light, so to say, they realize they should be sharing their time between producing and marketing at a 50:50 % ratio most of the time. This is, if they want to be successful.

An insight

Now, if you’ve been following me, you may be asking what you need to do next. First, let’s expose the so-called marketing “activities.” I tend to say these are tasks, and of course, execution demands it. There is also the point of view that marketing is a philosophy. If you think about it, when you reason, you tend to use logic often. With marketing, you’ll find that the premises are built on solid ground, and you may base your decisions on them. My point is that there are no on and off switches for marketing; it’s a fluid development.

Real To-Do’s

A marketing project, function, or process may require certain activities. You’ll usually find a core set of activities such as market research, planning (analysis, positioning, measurement), and external but closely related tasks in the areas of content creation and design (including web design). There are many more things according to the brand, venture, project, or business, but these examples illuminate the need to work with external providers, or, gulp, roll up our (digital) sleeves ourselves and do some of the work.

Getting to the point

As you can see, marketing touches key areas of your activities, but sometimes, it doesn’t delve too deep into an area. As an example of this, you can test how the color of a button is converted without necessarily being a web designer. Another example is that you often need to write copy for social media or another online property, and, as a marketer, you get to do this proficiently, but do you consider yourself a writer or still a marketer? As you can see with the examples written in this paragraph, we’re going to have a lot of fun exploring different fields, but at the same time, we’re going to have a purpose: Do great marketing.

Final words

I’ll give you a tip that I consider valuable: Even if an activity takes a large chunk of your time, it may not be as valuable as a few simple elements, such as updating your business or marketing plan or a small change of strategic direction. You should always include them in your activities (even if it takes a few minutes, you can and should batch them) since you may forget them to your demise.

There’s a world of possibilities ahead, and we’ll explore them thoroughly.