In my presentation at the Stamats conference, I asked a group of self-proclaimed “marketers” what I thought would be a relatively simple question: What is the different between Marketing and Communications?  

I didn’t expect a lot of hands to shoot up (no one wants to be that guy), but I didn’t expect what I got: You could have heard a pin drop in the room from silence.  Eventually a few people started shouting out answers, but none of the captured what I was looking for:

Communications makes marketing tactics tangible

The problem?  The constant confusing between the two terms, making them (in the minds of many practitioners) interchangeable.  In other words, a lot of people who produce communications materials for their institution consider themselves to be marketers when they’re really communicators.  It’s not that one is better or worse than the other, but they are different practices.

I really like the above definition of their differences because it articulates two things to me: 

  1. There is more to marketing that simply an execution of a communications piece, like a viewbook or an email solicitation. 
  2. The communications component of marketing is vital - without it your strategies are never made real for your audience.

Marketing is a more complex process than communications but when communicators mistakenly label themselves marketers, they’re prone to skip over important steps in that process.  Here’s my simplified version of the steps of marketing: 

  1. Set goals: What are you trying to achieve?  When you set goals, you are planning what success looks like.  One of the keys to setting goals is that you also need to make sure they are measurable, which comes in later in the marketing process.
  2. Plan your communications: Now that you know what you want to achieve, how are you going to achieve it?  This is the part where you research your audience (wants, needs, demographics, etc…) and plan the strategy for communicating with them (message, medium, tone, etc…)
  3. Execute your communications: This is the communicating part!  This is where you’re creating and sending your emails, designing and mailing your viewbooks, holding your events, and so on and so forth. 
  4. Assess your results: Did you meet your goals? What can you do better next time?  This is the step I most often see communicators overlooking.  They just move right on to the next project.

When a person skips over one or more steps in this process, it throws the whole thing off - if they skip over goal setting, they end up deeming that it can’t be measured (how many times have you heard that about social media?) when it COULD be measured if they had put the mechanisms in place to do so.  If they skip over assessment, they miss the whole point of this process in the first place, which is continual refinement and improvement to the marketing plan.  

The most prevalent hole I see people falling down when it comes to e-marketing is that they choose the technology they’re going to use before they know what they want to achieve.  In other words, they’re starting at step two in the process (where you select your medium(s)) and skipping over goal setting entirely.  Again, this is a great example of what happens when people proclaim that marketing efforts over social media can’t be measured.

The key takeaway that I hope you get from this post is that there’s more to being a marketer than executing communications tactics.  There’s planning, research, goal-setting, assessment and continual refinement (and a bunch of other stuff too but let’s just start there for now!).  If you want to call yourself a marketer, you need to go through all the steps - not just the fun, sexy ones.