Do you need a visibility or a marketing strategy? What's the difference?

Visibility and marketing are two terms that may seem very similar at first glance, often appearing to be used interchangeably. In fact, these days it seems like “visibility” is just the trendy new way to describe marketing. But are they really?  And more, how do you decide what you really need?

For example, if you are (an accountant, architect, technology startup ...) ready to take on & sign new clients - do you want to do a marketing campaign? A visibility campaign? Both? Neither?

Lets look at both of these business strategies more closely, to explore when you might want to choose one, over the other.

Marketing is intended to attract attention so you can communicate a message – it can be through external platforms like Social Media, or internally; your own website or email marketing activities. As a business, and a brand, you work to cement your message in the minds of your customers.  This is your opportunity to present what you believe is a compelling offer, a message that you think will help create demand for your service offering.

Whereas visibility is a subset of marketing and might even be considered public relations or “PR”, but it is much more than that. In building your visibility, you are being seen, presenting yourself or your firm, as an industry thought-leader and marketing, all in one. It can be a very long lead time, or none at all. Taking it a step further, visibility is getting found on Google Business (even if you are a virtual or remote business, even if you only serve B2B clients...visibility is thought-leadership and exposure all rolled into one.

Another way I like to think about this – marketing is the “brand”, the act of making an offer to the world and the system that helps them find you.  Visibility is the thought, the collective knowledge of the personalities involved in the brand, it is reminding people that they know someone who can solve their problem.  To me, visibility feels much more about building trust and making lasting business connections based on relationships and frankly, what OTHER people have to say about you and your firm. 

But yea, it is definitely some grey area. And I see many professionals using these terms to differentiate themselves as service providers. 

The answer to what you need, as with most things, is “It Depends!”

Understanding What Visibility and Marketing Are Not

Before exploring how visibility and marketing can be distinguished, it is vital to understand what both activities are not. 

Marketing is not organic or spontaneous.  Mostly, marketing is not even free - paid ads, event participation, inbound content, a website, a mar-tech stack...

Marketing is not about the people that work for the company or define the brand, nor their feelings or opinions.  It frequently relies on information and a system to drive awareness.

Marketing does not represent a person.  It represents a brand, it is what I often like to describe as 1:many.  One activity or tactic reaches MANY people.  So I guess it is not personalized (beyond the amazing power and capabilities provided by an automation and CRM platform like HubSpot.)

Meanwhile, visibility is not about the product or service, it is not about the brand. Rather than promoting the brand it creates awareness for thoughts and solutions, and demonstrates the thought leadership of the key leaders that represent the firm or organization behind the solution the brand provides. 

Visibility is not a logo, fonts or colors - sure anything you put into the public sphere should match the established brand guidelines (marketing) but visibility is not tactile nor concrete. Visibility is often earned through interviews, and defined by authenticity & personality.

The Differences

Marketing Is Temporary, Visibility Creates a Longer Lasting Impact

One significant difference between these two strategies is that the tactics applied in the form of marketing have a shorter lifecycle.  Think social media post.  Unless you are the “where’s the beef” commercial or get picked up by a major influencer, the public won’t remember it for long. (Which omg! That Wendy’s commercial is the first example of viral video, I can think of, we just didn’t know it at the time).    

No marketing campaign lasts forever, no matter how effective it may be. Every strategy and campaign derived to market a product has a well-defined beginning and end, but that is not the case with visibility.

When it comes to visibility, no matter at what point your company might be, practices centered on visibility – the feelings and earned trust stay around much longer.  So long in fact, that at some point your audience won’t even be able to tell you why they feel or believe a certain way about your or your ability to address their true needs.

This is primarily because these techniques and methodologies involve developing social capital through thought-leadership and education shaping an industry segment, rather than having a finite goal or revenue metric attached.

Visibility techniques and practices involve more ethereal outcomes. The efforts to create visibility has staying power.

Marketing Grabs People's Attention; Visibility Retains It

No matter the nature of your business and whichever industry you serve, you will always compete to be seen.  Our world is noisy. Our inboxes are jam-packed. Marketing works hard to rise above the din and be noticed. 

So, attention-grabbing marketing campaigns become the holy grail of marketing.

However, this is not all. Once you have successfully grabbed your client’s attention, retaining that attention is vital to building a long-term relationship. This is where earned social capital from visibility activities comes in.

Therefore another major difference between these approaches is that marketing is suited to grabbing the consumer's attention, while techniques and practices centered on trust & education will make you the one clients come back to, again and again. 

It’s a weird trick of human nature that consumers opt for eye-catching tactics that grab their attention, but what drives their loyalty is the brand rather than the specific product. And you are the brand. Your voice, your intellect, your ability to educate others is the “product”. 

People prefer to conduct business and support brands that are well-developed and have a mission and different guidelines as well. They need to be able to believe in the brand and the ideals that the brand stands for to be loyal to it.

This is why, although proper, eye-catching marketing tactics will help you set yourself apart from the crowd, this is just one part of the equation. You are nothing without a visibility strategy.

Why Marketing Fails Most Service Entrepreneurs

Marketing Without a Proper Strategy

One of the biggest reasons why most marketing practices that an entrepreneur uses to promote their service flop is that there is no planning or strategizing involved.

To effectively formulate a marketing campaign to promote your solution, understanding, research, planning and intention is required.  As an example, the accountant mentioned above would likely not yield great results from a single social media post in July.  Maybe slightly better results could be attained by that same single post in January.  But optimal results could be attained if they spent some time finding exactly where their client spends time in March, at the time they are desperate to get their taxes done, and understand the message that would help them commit now to avoiding the same tax-season blues NEXT year, and get them to start engaging in a trust-building campaign now.

This is because marketing just for “marketing” because you have FOMO or because “everyone else is doing it” without aligning your deeper mission and goals, with your prospects problems and constraints AND making sure you have the systems and people to effectively support this is just throwing resources down the drain.

Not Knowing Your Target Audience

Listening to your customers is essential to formulating an effective marketing campaign since it will help you understand your core audience better, and pinpoint your target audience to optimize your marketing efforts. Most service-based firms employ much larger service teams than they do marketing teams, so making sure you are effective and on-point is survival tactic #1!

Being out of touch with your clients pain points not only prevent you from connecting with their needs, but you miss out on valuable feedback to help you design your service offering.  Does your client prefer a hands on approach to their bookkeeping all year long? Or, do they want you to give them a system now to track their expenses and let you swoop in to push their taxes over the finish line come year-end?

Not Educating Your Ecosystem

Visibility focuses on educating around a problem, this could be through webinars or speaking at industry, professional or networking events. Engaging solely in a marketing approach fails to recognize that in high-value business-to-business (B2B) service offerings, requires customers to understand the problem and be open to new approaches to solve it. 

Visibility Examples

• Podcast Interview. You’ve crafted your one page introduction, pitched yourself and landed a guest spot on Accountants Extraordinaire (totally fictitious podcast) and will soon be heard by the podcasts regular subscribers but also the other guests audience and your own. This conversation allows you to share and debate your unique viewpoint on how to streamline the tax process.  Congratulations! You gained social capital.
• Social Media Visibility. Another example of creating visibility is engaging in open conversations on LinkedIn sharing your perspective on the pros and cons of DIY accounting approach versus hiring a bookkeeper. Directly interacting with your customer base puts you in front of their audiences as well. But it doesn’t even need to be a conversation on your page, with your clients – when you engage thoughtfully on any topic of interest to your potential clients, your name, your face, your title will appear and inevitably, people will check you out. I landed two clients last year alone simply by being present and visibly authentic.
• Online Reviews.  92% of all sales are influenced by some sort of client testimonial or online review.  

Examples of Marketing

• Paid Advertisements. One of the prime examples of marketing, paid ads, are all over the world in different forms and are known to be one of the most common examples of marketing.
• Email Drip Campaign. Once you have attracted new prospects and earn their email address, perhaps you have an evergreen drip campaign that sends them an email every 3 days warming them up to the problem you solve and eventually offering this to them in the form of a promotion on your solution.

So, do you need a marketing strategy or a visibility strategy?

And the answer is… BOTH. Ok, it’s not ALWAYS both, for everyone.  However, most service providers will benefit by a thoughtfully crafted strategy that includes targeted marketing tactics AND opportunities to gain visibility with new and existing audiences alike. 

No matter what you decide, be sure, as we discussed above, to really take time to get to know your clients and their challenges and identify the most effective approach to reach your goals.  I personally am a firm supporter of the 80/20 approach.  In all areas of life, it holds true that 20% of your effort, delivers 80% of your outcomes.  So rather than become overwhelmed with a two-pronged marketing AND visibility approach, take a look at the 2 things that have the greatest impact, and start there.

Ready to get noticed and grow? Download the Visibility Menu & V.A.L.U.E. guide for more ideas to grow your visibility and leadership.