Why has complex marketing as an approach become a deficit in 2022?

Throughout the whole human history, the labor market has constantly been changing. New professions have been appearing, specialists were becoming extremely demanded, but over time, With the development of science, technical progress lots of professions became outdated. Alongside, we can currently notice such a phenomenon as the market narrowing. If at the beginning of the XX century young people were to choose a career path from a very limited list of specialities, now we see that there exists such a wide range of possibilities that some professions we hear about for the first time. There’s no way it could’ve gotten past the marketing field.

Initial business problem

Online marketing tools are growing in complexity, their number is increasing, and the user is becoming harder to influence due to his awareness and easy access to information. That’s why it’s becoming more difficult to gain your client.

The business has a critical need for the effective struggle for the audience attraction under the conditions of a highly saturated and global market, and more essential, people conduct until the target action performance and repeated sales.

It’s becoming possible only with the help of a strategic approach to marketing. That is when a general functional system is built.

Market problems

Career market problem consists in the increasing number of professions, dichotomy happens, and within each direction, more local professions appear.

Could we have imagined twenty years ago that copywriter will be split into numerous professions: emailing copywriter, selling texts copywriter, screenwriter-copywriter, SMM copywriter, SEO copywriter, PR copywriter, and dozens of other writers? I doubt that.

Have a conditional Storiesmaker on Instagram got a complex SMM approach? Unlikely as well.

As a result, we have a question: where and how to find a specialist or an agency that provides a truly complex view on marketing and creates such structure?

Unfortunately, I do not have an answer to this question. Regardless of the market saturation and a huge number of agencies, only a few offer a complex view on marketing. I cannot say for sure, but it’s better not to rely on numbers and self-presentation, but rely on the working approach. Competent marketing always begins with self-analysis. Without it, one can never synthesize an effective working plan.

The second question that often emerges in the head of a business owner is connected with in-house team hiring. Whom does a specific marketing department need? Hiring a big number of narrow-profile specialists is inappropriate both from the financial perspective and the organizational one — the more chain the manufacturing process has, the less the team effectiveness becomes. Also, it’s extremely difficult to choose CMO who will be able to build a team basing not on the narrow-profile knowledge, but in such a way that covers the whole marketing funnel with resources.

Is it possible to get a complex strategy from a narrow-view specialist?

Any strategy implies an analytical stage, and the marketologist market constriction leads to a very narrow analysis that would be somehow adapted to his skills and experience. He is not objective.

As an example we can take quite an everyday situation: when you focus on a specific object, everything around is a bit vague.

Here we have a similar situation. When a modern specialist deals with one instrument, he cannot deflect his attention to the others so that it would make a holistic ecosystem.

And the task of every marketing is to form a system where every unit is lite a puzzle piece that helps in creating a single picture.

That is, in this situation we face the inability to analyze complexly, the type of analysis that truly takes into account enough factors to create a holistic marketing structure based on it.

If to look globally, the market turns out to be composed of a variety of specialists that make disparate local actions without understanding how to constitute a general strategic picture with them.

And the notion of the strategy itself has become blurred due to the market changes. Instead of creating a single multichannel structure — in fact, it’s all about projecting a massive algorithm where a specialist chooses the channels used to let the potential audience in and how to prevent them from leaving this structure before committing a target action, and it’s highly desirable that after committing a target action, this client will not be lost but was deterred with the help of upsale, cross sale, or any other action aimed to increase the client’s LTV — we get a set of single chaotic decisions and actions.

Correspondingly, a huge problem emerges. If you are a business owner, you decide whether to address the agency and get a complex service or find a head of marketing department and get the same complex service.

A global task is clear: an unbiased glance at the project — cold and analytical — is needed.

What glance are we talking about? We are talking about the situation when a specialist looks at the product, its quality, what it consists of, the market environment the product was placed in or is being placed in now. Accordingly, the channels that will bring result are formed.

Not based on personal skills or preferences, not based on an agency’s specialization, but based on the objective needs of a given product in order to be promoted in the market environment.

This is the professional approach that is almost absent in the modern market, as the specialists have a narrow view. It’s really hard to find a marketologist who would see everything widely and comprehensively.

What about the business process?

Such specialist must possess specific organizational skills, or an agency must create a strong management system because when you have created a general structure, even if it’s working, the next step is the formation of systematic work within this structure to ensure at least an effective testing period with the aim to identify the correspondence of this system to the needs of a client.

It can be difficult to perform, as the skills of systematic work and thinking are lost for the specialists of many agencies. Actions are made spontaneously and cannot lead to a stable and predictable result.

Even if a specialist demonstrates a perfect strategy and structure that, nevertheless, is realized fragmentary and haphazardly, there is no place for representative data.

A purpose of any marketing strategy realization is to build a theory that must be based on a quality systematic analysis. A structure that enables testing and realization of this theory must be created.

We proceed to the stage of this structure implementation, systematic testing during the period established for the test, specific metrics monitoring, and the analysis of the given numbers. And based on these numbers, it becomes possible to identify the elements that are to be scaled and relayed in future and the ones that are to be declined.

Samurai has no goal, only path…

The whole marketing is a continuous permanent process of data collecting, analysis, and adjustment. Thus, there is no single ideal strategy that works for a long time.

It is being systematically corrected as there is a bunch of factors that are to be taken into account [season, demand, trends, market dynamics, changes in the competitive environment, new products implementation, competitive products implementation, implementation of cross products that substitute your one…].

It leads to even bigger chaos in the operational process, and without a verified strategy with a quality data collection and analysis, it all turns out to be nonconstructive and inconsistent actions. Any «victories» in such conditions appear to be random, and advertising investment payback transforms into Russian roulette.

A brief summary

Trend on narrowing leads to the situation when the whole system stops being monolith, and the formation stops being fundamental in marketing, that is instead of learning marketing principles, people only deal with instrumental questions. And how can an instrument be applied without understanding the general context of its use?

If to talk about problem-solving, everything is difficult here. Piece specialists are required, those who have fundamental education, know how to work with information. They must be assiduous enough and have enough experience in working with different instrumental specialists and team members that help them with creating a competent strategy, management, and business processes, as well as conduct thorough and consistent tests, analyze and correct the work consciously.

Do you believe that the problem with narrow-viewed specialists really exists on the market? Have you ever faced it personally?