You can call it whatever you want: influencer relations, influencer marketing, evangelist, advocate, thought-leader, social/community manager, technical marketing engineer, etc. If the goal of your job is to educate non-customers in hopes that they will become customers, you’re marketing to them. Every time you ask someone with one of these titles what their role is I bet the answer either starts with or ends with “but I’m not marketing”. Why!? Marketing isn’t the problem, in fact if it wasn’t for marketing we probably wouldn’t have jobs. Why would customers even look at our product if there wasn’t someone somewhere telling them why we’re better than X?

So what is the problem, why is everyone afraid/embarrassed to say their job is marketing? The answer is simply: because so many before them have done it wrong. So many times it’s obvious the person pushing the product doesn’t know anything more than what is on the slides. Even worse than that….there tactic to sell their product is to just bash the competitors. Unfortunately this is what most people will think of when you say “marketing’. In my opinion marketing has been done wrong for so many years, so many “marketers” focus solely on information out on a product and it doesn’t matter if that information is correct.

My question to marketers is why can’t we change this perception? Let’s start focusing on what matters…how our products can help customers solve their problems. We need to make sure we understand our product, get hands and actually believe in what you are trying to sell. Marketing doesn’t have to be this shameful job, let’s make sure we’re talking with customers and understanding what they are looking for and then utilize the different tools we have to get correct and useful information out there.  All of the roles I mentioned at the beginning of this post have their different ways of reaching potential customers, let’s just make sure we’re making a good name for marketing!

Love to hear your thoughts on this, you can comment below.