Utility post: What do all these marketing people do all day?

B2B Startups usually have very lean 1-5 person marketing teams (if at all) who handle all the marketing jobs to be done for a company. So a lot of people from startup land are surprised when dealing with more mature companies who have large global marketing teams, and they often ask me: 

“What do all these fucking people do all day?”

It’s easy to assume they’re all idiots (which a lot of you do), and I’ve been asked this exact question myself by a CEO who I used to work for who didn’t really “get” marketing you might say. And the loaded question has a ring of truth to it: marketing is often staffed by people who liked making dioramas in class and decorating things. There are those people and I think it’s okay to laugh at them.

But if you read my last post about how B2B Marketing is primarily about the fuzzy stuff, making people feel good about you and (surprise, surprise!) how that makes people want to buy stuff from you, I regret to inform you that if you want to do that at scale across countries and time zones, you’re going to need some (good) people to do it. 

So I think it’s helpful to understand who these people are and what they do, and how to spot a good one. And even if you’re a startup, you should make sure these roles are covered, even if in one very tired and overstretched person. Let’s start with the most common roles:

Product Marketing (Manager/Director/VP)

Good: A PMM is the voice of the customer throughout the product development and release process. They are part of customer research (you do customer research to figure out what to build, right?) along with the product team, identifying what customers want and what their pain points are. Then they fight for those things to be part of the product while they build go-to-market plans to release whatever product builds. Done well, the exact things the customers said about their pain and your proposed solution are the foundation of the language a PMM uses in the collateral, decks, release notes, and landing page copy. Effective PMMs deeply understand the technology and how the product works, and they have great verbal and writing skills to explain the benefits.

Bad: PMMs make decks and add menu dropdowns to the “Product” or “Solutions” tab of your website every time the CEO reads a competitor’s press release or has a New Idea™. New product categories need dedicated PMMs to manage the deluge of “can I get a one-sheet about [X]” or “we’re releasing feature [Y], sales needs collateral and training on [Y].” Product Marketing takes the blame for why Sales Doesn’t Know How To Sell, Why We Have Too Much Shit, and other sundry unpleasantness.

Regional Marketing / Country Marketing (Manager/Director/VP)

Good: These are your classic, shoe-leather, on-the-ground marketers who handle all promotional activities for a given region. They’re the ones who do your events, sponsorships, activations, gimmicks, stunts, and ad campaigns. Done well, they’re following the Marc Benioff playbook and “the event is the message” – every customer interaction they create for your sales team is made to reinforce the positioning you’ve (hopefully) earned with your customers. And events are truly hard to do well, but they’re the key to liquoring your customers up and getting them to buy stuff from you when they ordinarily might not. Under this title you often have “event marketing” or “experiential marketing” depending on how big a company it is. Also this role can be sometimes called “field marketing.”

Bad: Glorified party planners / booth builders who spend your budget on internal boondoggles your Sales team asks for but then immediately blames when asked “why are we spending money on this?”

Corporate Communications / PR (Manager/Director/VP)

Good: These people get you in press, on television, on stage at events, and are the hype machines of your company. They create opportunities for you to be quoted in stuff even when you don’t have anything new to say, yet they’re honest with you when you don’t have enough for your press release to get picked up. When you get yourself in trouble, they turn into The Wolf from Pulp Fiction and fix it for you. They are professional schmoozers and name-droppers. The best comms people can give actual reporters as references when you hire them. N.B.: You will see external comms firms being contracted as well as internal comms people; generally you pick one or the other but there are companies who have reasons to have both.

Bad: For $10k/mo they write press releases for every new product release and hire, spend another $500+ to put them on sites like “PRNewsWire” and email to an outdated Excel spreadsheet of “reporters” who promptly mark as SPAM.

Growth Marketing (Manager/Director/VP/SVP/CGO)

Good: They run campaigns on Google, FB, Instagram, TikTok, and open web DSPs that generate interest and pipeline. Monday.com is famously brilliant at this, but they also spend much, much more money than most of you have to do it (and if you’re B2B, it’s really difficult to ‘dabble’ in this stuff, you kind of have to go big or go home). They pore over Google Analytics and spreadsheets to see where they should move budget to, which keywords to target, and often they use intelligent tools to help their bid strategy.

Bad: Voodoo. I’m serious. Unless you’re backing a dump truck full of money into Facebook and Google or whatever, I have never seen this work for purely enterprise-sale type companies. And small-ticket B2B SaaS is so incredibly difficult to market (especially in post-ZIRP times), very few companies are going to make the unit economics work here, try as they may. And I know a lot of CMOs think that calling themselves “Chief Growth Officer” is going to keep them from being doomed by the notorious 18-month CMO tenure; it will not.

And now let’s do some more niche ones. I’ll just say what they do when done well as I haven’t encountered enough of them to make fun of how their job could be done poorly:

Content Marketing (Manager/Director/[rarely]VP)

This role can be independent or it can be under Comms; it can be internal or an external firm, but its main goal is to build lots and lots of content that gets people who otherwise wouldn’t choose to find you online to end up on one of your pieces of content. They follow trends in the market to understand what your customers probably want to read that isn’t just about your product or service. They interview internal subject matter experts, ghost write op-eds for them, publish glossaries or dictionaries on your website, and manage a lead flow that they can quantify. They might launch your hit podcast!

Brand Marketing (Manager/Director/VP)

This isn’t really a standalone role at most B2B/enterprise companies. While I do believe that your brand –i.e. your story, your main message, the positioning you earn in your customers’ minds– is the single most important thing your marketing team should focus on, it usually isn’t concentrated in one person or set of people. Sometimes you see a “brand marketing” org that does the same types of activities that a regional / country marketing org would do; they just have a different naming convention.

Sales Marketing (Manager/Director/VP)

This is kind of a mishmosh of Brand Marketing, Product Marketing, and Regional / Country Marketing. The important thing is it’s focused on sales enablement, giving sales exactly what they need to close big accounts. I think more marketing teams should organize around this role, because a good sales team is a force multiplier for marketing and vice versa.

Marketing Operations (Manager/Director/VP)

People love to shit on this one, but if you run a marketing team of any significant size (>25 ppl) across multiple regions, you will begin to understand how much of marketing is project management and execution. Also, to the extent that what we do is measurable, you’ll need someone on top of that kind of reporting. People who are good at this role are worth their weight in gold, and they should report directly to the CMO.

Marketing Analytics / Data and Analytics (Manager/Director)

This is a cool one-off role that combs your product and customers for “data stories” that you can use to feed into your marketing programs, collateral, comms, and content. Depending on the type of company you are, this can be the lifeblood of your story when you don’t have any new shiny product features to talk about. “Spotify Unwrapped, but for B2B” is a tactic that never gets old and if you don’t have someone actually on the marketing team doing this, the work will continue to get de-prioritized over feature work. 

Sometimes this role does analytics on the performance of your marketing campaigns themselves, but then they’re usually under Growth Marketing.

Designer (Manager/Director)

Underrated team member. Always. Please be nicer to your designers. They make stuff look cool, and I think I mentioned before that what marketing does is gets people to feel good about you. And if Marketing doesn’t have one all their own (or access to a steady external resource), the things you do will not land, you will not look good, and people will not feel good about it. 

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So that’s what these people do all day. Did I miss anyone? Oh yeah the CMO. I’ll talk about that one later…