First of a Series: The Question Most Marketers Never Ask
Ask most marketers what they’re working on and you’ll likely get a quick, concrete answer about a new email campaign, a LinkedIn content push, a website refresh or maybe a product launch.
These tactics easily roll off the tongue precisely because they are concrete and can be summarized into a sound bite.
What you’ll hear far less often—almost never, in my experience—is a clear answer to the question that should come before any of that: What do I actually want my audience to think, feel, or do as a result of this marketing?
The problem with the question is that it sounds insultingly simple. Of course we know what we want to achieve with our marketing! But do we really? Knowing that you want “more leads” or “better brand awareness” is not the same thing as being clear on the specific shift you’re trying to create in a specific person at a specific point in their buying journey.
And the problem with not answering the question is that the gap between vague aspiration and genuine intent is often where marketing falls apart.
The Marketing Tactics Trap
Tactics are, quite literally, how things get done. So I’m not here to say there’s anything wrong with thinking tactically. (It’s ironic that “strategy” is such an overused word when actual strategic thinking is so underused.)
The problem is that thinking tactically first creates a trap that it can be hard to escape because taking action is not the same as getting results.
Tactics without intent can easily lead us to mistake being busy for being productive. That feels obvious enough that it’s fair to ask why so many of us default to a tactics-first approach.
Partly it’s a practical problem. There’s always a deadline to meet and being able to point to something, anything you’re doing to meet your responsibilities feels good. Necessary, even.
Psychology plays a role, too. Tactics feel productive. You’ve got something to point to at the end of your day. It’s much harder to sit with a tough strategic question before getting started with the writing or design work. It can even feel like procrastination.
But skipping the intent question doesn’t make it go away. It just means you’re making implicit choices about your goals rather than explicit ones. Your content will communicate something. The question is whether that something is what you actually intended.
Three Kinds of Marketing Outcomes (and Why the Difference Matters)
Before you can get clear on what you want your audience to do, it helps to understand that your goal almost certainly falls into one of three categories. Each requires a different approach.
The first is changing what they think. Maybe your prospects don’t know you exist. Maybe they have an outdated or incomplete picture of what you do. The goal here is a shift in belief or awareness: you want them to think, “This company understands our problem.” Content that educates, reframes assumptions, or challenges conventional wisdom lives here.
The second is changing what they feel. Awareness isn’t trust. A prospect can know exactly who you are and still not be convinced that you’re right for them. The goal at this stage is emotional resonance—you want them to feel understood, to feel that you are speaking directly to their needs. This is where voice, specificity, and genuine point of view do the heavy lifting.
The third is changing what they do. When a prospect is ready to act, the marketing job shifts again. Now the goal is reducing friction and making the next step obvious. Clear calls to action, well-constructed offers, and landing pages that don’t make people work to figure out what you’re asking are required to succeed in the latter stages of the buyer’s search.
The trouble we see many marketers run into is creating content for one stage and presenting that to prospects in another. They send conversion-focused emails to people who are barely aware of them. Or they create thoughtful awareness content for prospects who are already sold and just need to know what to do next. Mismatched intent and stage is one of the most common and most avoidable reasons marketing underperforms.
Define Your Desired Marketing Outcomes
Here’s a step in the process that gets even less attention: before you can define what you want your audience to think or do, you have to be honest about what you want to accomplish.
This isn’t as obvious as it sounds. Saying “I want leads” is not the same as saying “I’m trying to displace a competitor in a specific market segment” or “I’m trying to reposition the company after a product line change” or “I’m trying to shorten a sales cycle that’s gotten too long.” Each of those goals points to a different strategy, different content, different channels, and different metrics.
When the underlying business goal is murky or assumed rather than stated, marketers do work that doesn’t lead to outcomes. Everyone is busy, but the metrics aren’t moving.
The Clarity Test
Over the next several articles in this series, we’ll dig into each of these areas in depth. But even before that, there’s a simple, three-question test you can apply to any piece of marketing you’re about to publish.
- Have I defined what I want a prospect to think or do as a result of this?
- Does the content or campaign lead them there?
- Will they know what to do next?
If you can’t answer all three clearly, the work isn’t done. Not because something is wrong with the execution, but because the intent hasn’t been defined clearly enough to guide how you execute.
You already know that your audience is overwhelmed with content. Gaining their attention is harder than ever. Clarity of intent is one of the few real differentiators left. Don’t waste it.
Knowing what you want to achieve and mapping out how to succeed is what this series is about. By the end, you will be producing more effective marketing.
We’ll start next time by looking at the hardest and most undervalued stage of marketing: getting someone to think something new.
This is the first article in the “Marketing With Intent” series. Future installments will cover marketing for awareness and perception, trust and emotional resonance, action and conversion, aligning your business goals with your marketing strategy, and a practical framework for putting it all together.
Occasional large-scale changes can re-invigorate a marketing plan that’s beginning to falter and can provide a blast of inspiration that ripples out through the rest of your marketing. By the way, if you’re interested in hearing some of my podcast and radio appearances, you’ll find a few of them listed on the Andigo website.
Photo by Selma DA SILVA on Unsplash
