Marketing Disciplines Explained
The same work gets sold under four different names. The same name covers four different levels of work. This is a map of the profession, including the parts that are not digital, so you can work out who you actually need and recognise what you are being sold.
Why The Terminology Is A Mess
Marketing job titles and service names are used loosely, by everybody, including people who know better. A buyer trying to compare two proposals is comparing words that do not mean the same thing in each.
One job, four names. Sold differently by different firms.
Writing useful material for a website is content marketing, inbound marketing, search optimisation, else brand publishing, depending on who is quoting. The work can be identical.
One name, four levels. The more expensive problem.
Two firms both offering social media management. One posts three times a week. The other researches the audience, produces original material, runs advertising and reports on enquiries. Same name, different professions. The quotations will differ accordingly.
Why nobody fixes it. No authority to fix it.
Marketing has no protected titles and no registration. Anybody may describe themselves as any of these things, which is neither a scandal nor something about to change.
What this page is for. Better questions.
Not to give you the correct definitions, since there are none. To let you ask what a supplier means by the word they used, then to know what you are missing.
The Three Big Divisions
Before the individual disciplines, the three purposes they serve. Almost every argument about marketing is really a disagreement about which of these somebody is buying.
Brand marketing. Building recognition and preference over time.
Making people know who you are and think well of you before they need you. Slow, cumulative and genuinely difficult to attribute. Judged over years rather than months.
Performance marketing. Buying measurable response now.
Activity where a pound goes in and a countable result comes out. Fast, controllable and it stops when the money stops. Judged on cost per result.
Product marketing. Deciding what is sold, to whom and at what price.
The least visible and frequently the most valuable. Which services to offer, how they are packaged, what they cost, how they are positioned against alternatives.
Why the digital label tells you nothing. It cuts across all three.
Digital work can be brand building, performance buying or product positioning. A firm offering digital marketing has told you which route they use rather than which job they do, which is why the word alone cannot be compared between quotations.
The Disciplines, Part One
For each: what it is, the job it does, what a good outcome looks like and who usually carries it out. Nothing here explains how any of it is done.
Search optimisation. Being found when people look. Good looks like enquiries from people describing a problem rather than typing your name. Specialist agency, specialist freelancer or an in house specialist.
Paid search. Buying position on a results page. Good looks like a cost per enquiry you can afford, with irrelevant searches excluded. Specialist agency or freelancer, since the ongoing management is the skill.
Paid social. Buying reach on social platforms. Good looks like reaching people who did not know you, at a cost that survives the sales cycle. Frequently a different specialist from paid search.
Organic social. Publishing and replying. Good looks like recall, replies and profile visits rather than follower counts, as set out in what is social media marketing. Often in house, because the material comes from the business.
Content marketing. Producing material that answers what buyers ask. Good looks like fewer repeated questions and material sales staff actually send. In house subject knowledge with external writing or editing.
Email marketing. Messaging people who gave permission. Good looks like revenue per message and a list that grows. Frequently in house, since it needs product knowledge.
Lifecycle and customer relationship marketing. Managing what happens after the first sale. Good looks like repeat purchase rising. Rare in small firms and disproportionately valuable when present.
The Disciplines, Part Two
Same treatment. Several of these are commonly sold to small businesses that do not need them yet.
Public relations. Earning coverage and managing reputation. Good looks like being quoted where your customers read. Specialist agency or consultant. The trade press route is far cheaper than the national one.
Digital public relations. The same work aimed at online publications, frequently to earn links. Good looks like coverage on sites your customers actually visit rather than anywhere that will take it.
Affiliate marketing. Paying others a share for sales they refer. Good looks like incremental sales rather than commission on customers who were already coming. Managed by a specialist or a network.
Influencer marketing. Paying somebody with an audience to feature you. Good looks like an audience that genuinely matches yours, at a size you can afford to test.
Display and programmatic advertising. Visual adverts on other people's sites, covered in what is display advertising. Good usually looks like remarketing rather than cold prospecting.
Conversion rate optimisation. Improving what happens once people arrive. Good looks like more enquiries from the same traffic. The most under-bought discipline on this page.
Marketing automation. Sequences triggered by behaviour. Good looks like relevant messages rather than volume. Frequently sold to businesses with too few contacts to justify it.
Analytics and measurement. Making the numbers trustworthy. Good looks like everybody agreeing what a conversion is. Buy this first, not last.
The Disciplines, Part Three
The strategic disciplines, then the offline ones. Most articles on this subject pretend the offline world stopped existing, which is untrue for a great many UK businesses.
Product marketing. What you sell, to whom, at what price. Good looks like an offer people understand and choose without negotiating. Usually the owner, whether or not they call it that.
Brand and creative. How the business looks, sounds and is recognised. Good looks like being identifiable without the logo. Studio or freelance designer.
Market research. Finding out what people actually think. Good looks like a decision changed by a finding. Rare in small firms, though a dozen customer conversations count.
Partnership marketing. Reaching an audience through somebody who already has it. Good looks like a referral relationship producing work both ways. Usually the owner. Frequently the cheapest growth available.
Print. Brochures, leaflets, signage. Still effective where the customer is local or the purchase is considered.
Direct mail. Addressed post. Expensive per item, largely uncontested now, reaching people no digital channel can.
Outdoor. Vehicles, boards, site hoardings. A liveried van is outdoor advertising most trades already own and rarely think of that way.
Radio, events and trade press. Local radio for consumer services, events and trade press for business selling. All three remain effective in the right sector.
How They Interact
Disciplines are sold separately and do not operate separately. Three specific conflicts matter to anybody paying more than one supplier.
Dependency. Several are worthless without another.
Paid advertising depends on conversion work, since buying traffic to a page that does not convert wastes the budget. Content depends on measurement, else nobody can say whether it did anything.
Overlap. Two disciplines doing the same task.
Content marketing and search optimisation both produce written material. Digital public relations and content marketing both chase coverage. Paid social and organic social both post. Briefed separately, they duplicate.
Conflict one: brand terms. Two suppliers, one sale.
Somebody searches your name and clicks a paid advert. Paid search reports a conversion. The reason they searched your name was social or public relations, which report nothing. Both suppliers describe the same sale differently. Only one invoices for it.
Conflict two: remarketing. Credit for a returning visitor.
Display reports a sale from somebody it reached again. That person arrived first through search, which also claims them. The measurement question sits in return on marketing investment. The commercial question is that you are being invoiced twice for one result.
Conflict three: timescales. Brand versus performance in the same meeting.
Performance reports monthly and looks decisive. Brand reports over years and looks vague. Budgets get moved towards whoever can show a number this month, which is a measurement artefact rather than a judgement.
What A Small Business Actually Needs
Under twenty people, most of that list is irrelevant this year. Five disciplines matter first, in this order. The order is the useful part.
First, analytics and measurement. Everything else reports through it.
Without it you cannot tell which of the others worked, so every later decision is a guess with a budget attached.
Second, conversion. The site has to turn interest into enquiries.
Improving this makes every other discipline cheaper simultaneously, which no other item on the list does.
Third, search optimisation. Capturing demand that already exists.
The cheapest customers available, since the wanting already happened.
Fourth, content. Answering what buyers ask before choosing.
Also the raw material every other channel needs, per what is a content strategy.
Fifth, one paid channel. Whichever suits your buyers.
Once you know what converts. One, run properly, rather than three run thinly.
What can wait. Nearly everything else.
Automation, affiliate, influencer, programmatic and formal research are all legitimate disciplines that a small business rarely needs before the five above are working.
Who Does What
The same discipline can be delivered four ways. Job titles say less about capability than people assume.
In house. Suits work needing constant business knowledge.
Content, organic social, email. The material comes from inside the business, so an outsider spends most of their time asking.
Agency. Suits work needing several disciplines at once.
Or continuity across absence. You pay a margin for the coordination, which is worth it when the coordination is the hard part.
Freelance. Suits one deep specialism.
Frequently the best value per hour, provided somebody internal can manage them.
Contractor. Suits a defined project with an end.
A rebuild, a migration, a one off piece of work.
What titles actually mean. Less than you think.
Marketing manager can mean anything from an executive who schedules posts to somebody running a full programme. Head of growth usually means performance marketing. Marketing executive is normally junior. Ask what they have personally done rather than what they are called.
The limit worth knowing. Two or three disciplines.
Nobody covers more than that properly. A candidate claiming all of search, paid, social, content, email and analytics is describing awareness rather than competence.
Spotting A Discipline Done Badly
You cannot judge the craft without doing the job. You can judge four things from outside. They apply to any supplier including this one.
Reporting that only shows activity. The clearest sign.
Posts published, keywords tracked, emails sent, hours spent. All describe effort. None describes a result. A report containing only these is telling you nobody is measuring outcomes.
No measurement in place. Or none anybody can explain.
If nobody can say what a conversion is defined as, the numbers in every other report are unreliable.
Work that cannot be explained plainly. The most reliable test.
Anybody genuinely competent can explain what they are doing and why in ordinary language. Retreating into jargon when asked a simple question is usually a sign that the answer is uncomfortable.
Results claimed with no baseline. The commonest of the four.
A percentage improvement with no starting point stated, else a comparison against a period chosen after the fact. Ask what it was before, then when the measurement started.
What none of these proves. Bad intent.
Most of it is inherited habit rather than deception. It is still worth asking. A good supplier will welcome the question.
Common Mistakes
Each of these follows directly from the terminology problem in block one.
Hiring a generalist for a specialist problem. Employing one marketing person and expecting search, paid, social, content, email and analytics from them. They will do two well and four adequately. Nobody will be able to say which.
Buying a channel because it is fashionable. Commissioning a discipline because it is discussed rather than because your buyers are there. The three tests in the marketing plan settle this properly.
Judging every discipline on the same measure. Holding brand work to a monthly cost per enquiry. It will fail, as would any long term activity measured that way.
Expecting brand work to report like performance work. The same error stated from the other side, worth separating because it produces a different decision. Performance answers what a pound bought this month. Brand answers why anybody chose you at all, which no monthly report captures. The category itself is defined in what is digital marketing. The full series is on the digital marketing guide.
