Why does marketing exist?

Why are we investing in SEO and content?

And how the hell do I use AI to improve my marketing?

Tom Winter has answers to all of those questions…and more! He is experienced and incredibly intelligent.

I had to ponder many of his answers, replaying the episode three times. And I continue to pull out new insights from it.

Below are the top five that will help you make progress on your marketing (you can also listen to the episode below):

https://share.transistor.fm/e/45295b7e

Insight 1: Marketing should focus on driving revenue.

To answer the question at the start of this essay: Marketing exists to drive revenue.

Sure, marketing has a million and a half other reasons for existing. But without this reason, brand building, internal communications, and other activities fall flat. You need marketing to drive revenue.

So, how do you do that?

Get involved. "Marketing should work with the whole company. {With} the main Northstar metric being the money (revenue)."

Marketing should touch (improve) almost every part of the business, aiming to increase revenue. So, define what metrics or inputs you can take to drive that.

And focus on doing more of that.

Without metrics or having those metrics tied to revenue, you will struggle to know if your actions are helping the business increase revenue.

Insight 2: Embrace experimentation and learning from failure.

Many marketing teams are afraid to do new things.

They repeat the same actions from 10 years ago and pray the results will magically differ. Unless you change your actions, you won't get different results. This is why experimentation is a practice of high-performing marketing teams.

Without experiments that have hypotheses tied to them, you will struggle to learn. And only through learning can you pivot and improve your marketing.

The critical part is having a hypothesis (a defined assumption about what will happen). "I like to have a hypothesis before I start doing any {experiment} task." And being open to being wrong.