Marketing is About Solving Hard Problems

Marketers are under more pressure to perform than at any time in the history of the profession.

Whether you’re the CMO of a Fortune 500 company, or a tactical specialist who’s responsible for SEO, content creation, or social media, you’re now expected to produce consistent and quantifiable results for your organization or clients.

To help them thrive in a constantly changing world.

Everything is measured. Everything is reported. It’s no longer enough to rely on fuzzy metrics and subjective opinions about success.

As marketers, we need to deliver.

And as you know, doing that consistently, day in and day out, is really hard! We feel that constant pressure to perform coming from our leadership team, our peers on the sales team, and our own coworkers in the marketing department.

To top it off, our jobs demand that we’re able to be creative while under that stress.

• To be in the flow and be accountable.
• To explore outside the box and deliver ideas that resonate with our bosses.
• To be both the artist and the math whiz, creating brilliant campaigns and content and resources that produce tangible results and contribute directly to revenue.

As marketers, our jobs really come down to solving hard marketing problems.

The most successful among us didn’t get that way by following some generic, color-by-numbers approach. The same routine of simply executing on a set of best practices. By just doing what we’ve always done and expecting to keep getting the same results.

Don’t get me wrong. Understanding the core principles behind the best practice, and learning from your experience, are both critical.

But to create real impact, real change, we need to go way beyond what we already know how to do. We need to be able to discover, diagnose, and solve really hard problems.

And your ability to do that doesn’t come down to your experience, or your talent, or your degree. It comes down to your ability to see.

The best marketers, the ones who constantly set new standards for what’s possible in our profession, get that way because they know how to push pass the automatic answers from their past. To challenge their assumptions rather than just confirm their pre-existing beliefs.

They know how to find and fix the blind spots that stop them from seeing the best solutions to their most challenging marketing problems.

So here’s a question to ask yourself:

• What am I not seeing?
• What blind spots are standing between you and the types of ideas and solutions that you know you’re capable of coming up with?
• What are those natural blind spots costing you in your career and your life’s work?
• What would you be able to achieve for your organization if you knew exactly how to find and fix those blind spots? If you were able to consistently explore your most challenging problems in ways that lead to solutions that others simply never see?