The tragic tale of the common marketer

Read enough marketing job ads and you start to feel sorry for the common marketer. The poor bastard is expected to understand brand, performance, content, social, SEO, SEM, CRM, analytics, automation, events, PR, partnerships, customer insight, websites, video, AI, sales enablement and probably Photoshop for some fucking reason. They should be strategic but hands-on, analytical but creative, commercially minded but passionate about storytelling. Experience with HubSpot is considered an advantage.

This isn't really a job description. It's a list of everything anyone in the company has ever heard marketing can do, and the annoying thing is that most of it really would be nice to have. The website could be better. LinkedIn has gone quiet. Nobody has touched the newsletter since February. The CRM is a crime scene. Sales needs materials. SEO could use some love. There is an event coming up. The CEO should apparently become a thought leader. The customer cases are ancient. A competitor has started a podcast. Someone has just returned from a conference extremely excited about AI.

None of these are necessarily bad ideas, which is exactly the problem. Marketing rarely suffers from a shortage of worthwhile things to do. It suffers from having far too many of them and nowhere near enough time, money or people to do them properly. You can spend your entire career doing perfectly reasonable marketing activities that make almost no difference to the business.

So the actual job isn't doing all the things in the job description. It is figuring out which ones matter right now. Maybe the company doesn't need a rebrand; maybe it needs ten uncomfortable customer conversations to understand why nobody is buying. Maybe the website really is shit. Maybe awareness is the problem. Maybe awareness is perfectly fine and the product becomes incomprehensible the moment a customer asks what it actually does. Maybe marketing is working and sales is the problem. Maybe sales is fine and the product is the problem. Unfortunately, there is no dropdown menu in HubSpot for this.

This is the part of marketing I increasingly think matters most: diagnosis, prioritisation and execution. Look at the business, talk to customers, talk to sales, look at whatever data is actually useful and make a judgement. Pick the few things most likely to change something, then actually do them. See what happened, learn, adjust and repeat.

It sounds almost insultingly simple, which may be why we have built such an impressive amount of professional machinery around avoiding it. We have frameworks, stacks, dashboards, roadmaps, transformation programmes and increasingly elaborate names for moving information from one rectangle to another. All of these can be useful, but none removes the requirement to decide what matters.

In fact, becoming more experienced can make the problem worse. Once you know how to do brand strategy, research, campaigns, content, media, automation, websites and analytics, you don't have fewer options. You have more. The value of experience is not that you can now do twenty things. It is that you might finally have the confidence to say nineteen of them can fucking wait.

That's the tragic tale of the common marketer. You get hired because you can do everything, immediately discover that everything needs doing, and eventually become useful when you learn not to do most of it.