A bit of advice: your marketing effort IS your website. There is no difference, and it’s all related to branding.
Placing the [...] videos on the [...] Internet home page is a great idea and really helps our marketing efforts! Adding the video icons also helps.
The above quote was taken from an e-mail from an employee to the webmaster. It conveys an extreme misunderstanding about the function of marketing in an Internet age. Let me try to straighten this out for anyone who happens to be interested. 
Marketing: a traditional definition
I don’t have my marketing textbook handy, but in my own words the traditional definition goes something like this:
“Marketing is the communication of a person, object, business or idea through the elements of Product, Price, Place and Promotion.”
Related to marketing would be branding. The brand of a product or business would serve to position the product in the eyes of the target consumer, describing the brand values through marketing channels.
Promotion Elements
The promotional tactics used by the business that, in addition to physical space and customer interactions, serves to communicate what is sometimes called the “brand image.” The customer’s impression of the brand values is helpful to sell the product or idea. In recent years, the view of marketing and advertising has spread to include all customer interactions and points of contact. And the term “Integrated Marketing Communications” (IMC if you like acronyms) has come about as a way to describe print, web, television, in-store and any other media working in harmony, promoting the same message to the target consumer.
In the particular business where the opening quote was encountered, the communication with customers was fragmented, handled by too many different people and departments. Print media usually looked unprofessional, thrown together quickly, and sometimes had grammatical or spelling errors. Online media had been created by different authors over and some pages had not been updated since 2001. Customer interaction was all over the map – some locations reported good customer service while others got complaints. Video media didn’t tie in with any other promotional efforts; in essence, each person in charge of putting out a piece of communication made their own rules, creating thousands of different voices attempting to promote the same overarching brand.
No consumer would have guessed that all those communications were from the same company!
Consider every opportunity
The solution? Consider everything. Every single communication with the customer is an opportunity to promote the values the brand stands for and to identify the brand so the public is familiar with it. Oh, and don’t have an ego about it – that’s just my advice, but consider this example.
Person A has got a great idea. It’s cutting edge, fantastic and it breaks all the rules. Person A thinks that everyone should know this idea, so she pressures the people who control the media. She convinces the TV station to run a segment about her idea, she gets another department to place an announcement in their newsletter and she gets a location to host a forum about her idea. If this idea supports the brand values, and showcases the company that the ideas are about, then it’s a good promotion. If it doesn’t mention the brand it’s about and does not communicate the same values, the contact is lost to the brand. It’s good for the individual, but not for the company.
This is the same case as the web case. The train of thought that is speeding much too fast thinks “There must be a place on our website where we can put our marketing messages.” Then it thinks “There should be a place at every location where we can place our marketing messages.” Then “We should have a printed publication to communicate our marketing messages.”
But that’s missing the point! Your website and your marketing message should be inseparable. The use of the web site should be constantly communicating that message with every click by way of design decisions. Same thing with customer service. Every interaction with a customer should communicate the brand in a sincere and subtle way. In the modern world, with successful companies, this is the method that’s been proven to help keep loyal customers and attract new ones.
Those of the old view think that marketing means coming up with a slogan, then hitting the customers over the head with it until they buy something. Modern-day customers don’t like to be hit with things, and I doubt older-day customers liked it either. Modern-day customers want to be shown. Not told.
What if your website stated proudly in large, red, type: “We are the latest and greatest!” Well, OK, but what if your site also looked like it was made in the 90s? Show the customer that you’re the latest and greatest by following a current design technique, using a new method for doing business that’s better than the previous method and by constantly trying out new ideas. Would that not communicate the core value in a better way than the large type?
I think so. And that’s my message.
