Marketing vs. Communications: Three questions to help you determine who to hire
Author: Natalie Pastuszak
Date: June 25, 2021
If you’ve recently said, “We need marketing and communications support,” this article is for you.
Most professionals understand the necessity for these disciplines, but often group them together. There is a lot of confusing overlap between marketing and communications – to catch up, read Part I of this series: “Marketing vs. Communications: What’s the difference?”
Whether you’re looking to hire your first marketing and communications team member or seeking external consultant and agency support, it’s important to note that there are professionals who specialize in one area over the other, and those who cover both. Expertise in one area does not necessarily mean expertise in the other.
This article provides you three key questions you and your team should answer to understand the best supporting strategy, and ultimately help you determine what professionals and teams to hire.
Question 1: What are your business needs over the next 12 months?
The stage of your business significantly determines the type of support it requires.
Think about what is critical to the success of your business over the next 12 months. Depending on the business, it’s not always easy just to say “more sales.”
Are you in the early stages of establishing a brand and narrowing in on your audience? Do you need to clarify and communicate your purpose in business? Do you need to bring your internal team on board? Is it imperative to build trust with key external stakeholders? Or perhaps you have services and opportunities that need to go to market?
Focusing on your goals over the next year and starting to identify the hurdles you may face will help you to identify what will better support your priorities.
Identifying clear goals outlines a roadmap for success.
Here are some examples of high-level priorities and the discipline that often supports them. Although not mutually exclusive, we’ve included some delineation to guide your planning.
Developing a brand: Often supported by both marketing and communications
Developing and establishing a new company brand
Researching your competitive landscape to better position your service or offering
Writing and facilitating the development of a company vision, mission and values
Informing and engaging stakeholders: Often supported by communications
Developing employee communications
Managing ongoing company brand and reputation through media and stakeholder relations
Managing various social channels and content
Generating awareness and attracting a target audience: Often supported by marketing
Generating awareness of a new service or offering
Identifying new sales leads and opportunities
Developing and executing programs to maximize engagement and traffic
Question 2: Which audience is most critical to your success today?
Consider who you need to engage and build relationships with, or convert, or whose buy-in you need. This will help to inform your hiring requirements.
Your marketing and communication efforts should be heavily influenced by your target audience.
Are your most critical audiences internal, such as employees, departments or board members? Are they external, and very specific to the industry you serve, such as industry media, an industry niche subset or government bodies that you need approval from?
Consider the groups that you need to engage for your business to survive. Reflect on their needs, the kind of relationships they value and their receptiveness to different storytelling, engagement and sales language and strategies.
The audience most critical to your success is your driving force.
Each audience group requires a different type of engagement and process. It’s important to find support that understands your target audience. While most businesses will have a variety of important stakeholders, hire in such a way as to align with the stakeholder most critical to your business success, and think about their imminent needs.
Here are some examples of company audiences and the discipline that often supports them. Although not mutually exclusive, we’ve included some delineation to guide your planning.
Internal stakeholders: Often suited to communications
Employees
Board members
External transactional audiences: Often suited to marketing
Customers or clients
Investors
Suppliers
External engagement stakeholders: Often suited to communications
Communities
Ownership groups
Media
Members of public
Government officials
Question 3: What are you selling?
Defining your business service or offering sounds simple. But for any company that works with intangibles, it’s more complicated than it sounds.
Whoever you hire should deeply understand your business activities.
Are you selling a clearly defined service or offering? Are you establishing an opportunity for investors? What is the length of your engagement lifecycle: days or years?
Here are some examples of business offerings and the discipline that typically supports them.
Clearly defined program or offering, with measurable and tangible metrics: Often suited to marketing
Less clearly defined offering whose value-add requires communication; less specific metrics, a long-term time horizon, many stakeholders: Often suited to communications
Marketing and communications work hand in hand and are based on complementary and similar principles, but their strategies can differ. In certain circumstances, one may be a subset of the other, or they may work equally in tandem. Hiring the right professionals who understand your specific business needs is critical. We always think, the better informed you are, the better the decision you make.
Blending internal and external support
It’s best to assess which elements can be supported internally and which can be supported through external consultants and agencies. Supplementing internal teams with external professionals offers the bench strength of a team that can ensure strategic goals are met and best practices are deployed.
Stay tuned for Part 3, which will dive even deeper to delineate the skillsets most prominent in marketers and communicators.
