Hail the maintainers (of product marketing)
What companies need to understand about the actual labour of marketing work
There’s an old 2016 Aeon essay I go back to often, titled Hail the Maintainers.
The premise is simple: Innovation might be overvalued and overhyped; maintenance, in fact, should be celebrated more.
The essay is a broad criticism of the ideals of innovation, disruption, and other such buzzwords that have been in vogue for the last decade.
The new, the shiny, and the glamorous is prioritised and celebrated, it argues, at the cost of actually creating meaningful things. And the sometimes menial and everyday labour of just keeping everything going is ignored, even looked down upon.
What it said then is even more important in this time, as we realise in the wake of this pandemic that societal foundations are weak and that that the infrastructure of modern life has been decaying.
But closer to home, doesn’t that apply to product marketing too?
How often have we been asked by our superiors about what new initiatives we have undertaken or what new thing we have launched? Fairly often, I’d say.
And this annoys me. I’ll tell you why: Just keeping the machine going takes work. A lot of work. Because marketing at times is plain, unglamorous, getting-it-done and that should be appreciated too.
What do I mean by this?
A company I know decided to stop paying attention to their blog. It was a successful company, it was a successful blog. They had been writing it for a while, and it had a great following in its domain. The reason given was that there wasn’t any direct attribution in terms of sign-ups from it, and the time and effort could be used for something else. The insinuation, unsaid but understood, was that the blog had been going on for a while. It wasn’t new enough. It wasn’t exciting enough.
Within two months, their numbers started dropping. It took another month for the company to realise that the blog had been a serious driver of traffic and sign-ups, and they had miscalculated what they could achieve with outbound.
By this time, their low-on-morale content team had started to disband. They never found their momentum again.
Now, please bear in mind that I’m not saying that new initiatives should not be tried out at all. But before you start doing that, you must first understand what’s working, and be careful not to disturb an already well-oiled, functioning machine.
Sadly, this understanding is rare.
During the annual appraisal at another startup, questions were raised about the role of a certain employee. She had been assigned to sales enablement, and her everyday work had been to make sure that sales teams had all the material they needed when they were engaging customers. Now take note that this is boring, meticulous work. But also incredibly important, as you can imagine why, and very specialised — you need experience to do this job well. An understanding of both the marketing and sales cycles is essential.
At the appraisal however, it was thought that this person had not been doing innovative work, had done few new things that year, and should have upped her game. Needless to say, she did not quite agree with this assessment. She promptly moved to a role where she could take the ‘new initiatives’ that seemed so important to management, where she wouldn’t have to defend her work again.
A few months later, it was brought up by the sales team that they needed support from marketing and because they weren’t getting it, they were losing deals. But no one wanted to take up the role now: The management had signalled that it wasn’t exciting enough for them. It was at this juncture that the importance of this role was appreciated, and the same person was brought back on board to do the job.
In both these examples, there is a common thread. In organisations, the new and shiny, the innovative and the disruptive, the big and the boisterous, are recognised and celebrated. And everything else suffers as a result.
This is my point: In marketing, the maintainers matter.
The writing teams that keep pumping out amazing content and make sure that the organic lead numbers never drop. They can’t do new things because writing, editing, and producing high quality content is taxing, cognitively demanding work. It takes all their time to do this well.
The product marketer who makes sure that official presentations remain updated all the time, who edits all the company collateral and makes sure there is not a single mistake when sales folks present, who makes sure product screenshots are updated and absolutely perfect and quirky enough to elicit a smile? All these roles and tasks are important. And all this takes time.
The least that organisations can do is at least try to understand what goes into making good, consistent, solid marketing. If they do, they’ll recognise the level of maintenance involved. And if they understand that, we can make marketing a lot better.
Note
This is the 25th edition of The CMO Journal. Which means I’ve written (in a couple of cases rewritten), and published 25 essays on SaaS marketing since March this year. It’s not phenomenal, but it’s still a good lot, and something I’m very happy about.
Thank you for all the mails, likes, and responses. Keep them coming, because I hope to keep this going for a while, and I need the encouragement!
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