Is Marketing Really Changing?

Marketing is a massive, confusing, convoluted industry that seemingly changes every day. The same techniques marketers use today are different from the ones they used yesterday. The tools marketers use are constantly rotating, algorithms shift, AI is evolving, and apparently marketers will soon be out of a job—or so I’ve heard.

All of this change has a lot of founders worried, but I think it’s a good time to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

The techniques and strategies marketers use might change, but the fundamentals of marketing are still the same—and in my humble opinion—more important now than ever.

This year, we welcomed Anthony Pierri to the Startup Mountain Summit, an actual LinkedIn legend and marketing pro in a world where everyone seems to own that title.

Even if Anthony wouldn’t phrase it exactly the way I do, he’s built his agency on one of the most fundamental principles in marketing: messaging and positioning.

How founders communicate their brand to customers is the foundation of every business and the most important thing for marketers to get right. The language, tone, and imagery we use to describe our business shape how consumers interact with the brand. The difference in just a couple of words can completely change the perception of the brand and the brand’s overall mission.

A wise marketer once said, “If you confuse, you lose,” and the fastest way to lose customers is by confusing them with your messaging.

Anthony’s agency mainly focuses on SaaS products, where it can be incredibly difficult to distill what a product actually does, especially when it has dozens of features and multiple customer segments.

Let’s take Airtable as an example. What does Airtable do? Is it an Excel wannabe? A CRM? App-development software? A productivity tool? A database?

When a product fits into multiple categories, defining it well is one of the biggest challenges a marketer will ever face.

And the only way to do that is to go back to the basics: actually talking to your customer.

It’s incredibly common for founders to build a product for a specific customer segment without fully understanding who that customer is, their pain points, or how they behave. This creates a major gap between what founders think customers want and what customers actually need. That gap almost always shows up in the messaging. The product doesn’t flop because it’s bad, it flops because the founder never learned their customer’s language.

One of the very first things we do in Avante is teach founders how to explain what their business does in two sentences. You’d be surprised how many founders overcomplicate this and end up explaining everything except the problem they actually solve.

The importance of messaging and positioning will never change. They will always be the first touch points in a consumer’s journey and the foundation of all marketing content from there on out.

The ways you will be marketed to are changing, but consumer behavior moves at a much steadier pace.

Thanks, Anthony, for inspiring me to go back to the beginning.