Marketing, the Chase Continues in 2014!

The Merriam-Webster's dictionary defines marketing as:

1a : the act or process of selling or purchasing in a market

b : the process or technique of promoting, selling, and distributing a product or service
2: an aggregate of functions involved in moving goods from producer to consumer

I like to think of marketing along the lines as building relationships with current and prospective Customers to build and sustain revenue. Over the past 20 years marketing has become more and more about selling or promoting than building or sustaining relationships. Maybe the problem was in the definition or my own naivete. Marketers have continued to seek out the next big thing to make their job easier and more effective to promote products. I sometimes wonder if the show Mad Men created a craving to return to the exciting days of the introduction of mass market advertising via TV. Unfortunately times have changed since then. Now instead of 3 TV channels, Consumers can watch an infinite amount of content, therefore reducing the effectiveness of TV (although live events are still really strong as witnessed by NFL ratings). We have also witnessed shifts in other form of advertising, such as newspapers, which has seen a shift to reading in a digital format. Even mail has been changing as people change their habits and obtain key items via electronic means instead of the excitement of getting the mail. I know I throw out almost everything that comes in the mail anymore.

I am relatively new to sitting in a marketing department. My background has always been in Customer Service, which I still view as the 2nd best way to market your products in a connected world. The first way is having products that do not require assistance at all, but that is not feasible for many types of products. Then service, but not from the perspective of selling people everytime they call, but instead by creating experiences that build trust in the brand and dedication to the product. Experiences with your product and Customer Service team create reasons for people to talk about your brand. Unfortunately many companies give us reason to talk, but not good reasons. I love how times are changing things!

In 2009 and 2010 marketers were chasing SEO and digital advertising. In 2011 and 2012 marketers started chasing social media. This continued into 2013, but with the added twist of real time marketing and social advertising. Today the marketing topic du jour is content marketing. I also expect data to be the other big topic for 2014 but I expect it will focus on targeting instead of the broader array of things we can do with data, including scalable intimacy which I outline in my book @YourService. All this chasing the next big thing. I still think boring Customer experience would be what I would chase, especially in a socially connected world. I expect that is where the C-Suite will focus, but if marketers want to chase other things, someone else in the organization can own that.

As these hot topics come up each year, they also create debate on the right approaches or if it will even work. We saw that throughout last year regarding real-time marketing. There is constantly a debate around social media. We are seeing the same for content marketing, as well as the native advertising (which could be a post by itself). Earlier this week Mark Schaefer did a post looking at the diminishing return of content marketing, and the phenomenon he called content shock. He demonstrated the point that today there is more and more content causing content producers to have to pay for views, impacting any return that could be achieved. It was a well done argument regarding the cost of content compared to the return. I have always wondered what would happen if every company was putting more and more content out. Shel Holtz followed this with a post of his own regarding six reasons content shock will not be an issue. Shel talked about many facets of content, including the fact that good content always floats to the top. Well I agree about good content. The challenge I have with content marketing is not that I think it is a bad thing, because I do not. I do think that businesses have not been strong content producers. First many brands want to force messages about how great their business or product is, as opposed to offering something of value for their reader. I also often find that the best content for brands does not come from something the brand produces, instead it is something created by their own employees or Customer (back to creating the right Customer & product experience!). I think we have seen many failures of content when we look at corporate blogs or a company's social media feed. It is imperative to learn that marketing is about creating value in the minds of Customers and prospective Customers not pushing something that they do not care about or have no interest in reading. If you do add value to their life through content marketing, then it is worth it. Of courst this holds true for any type of marketing. Maybe we should change the name from content marketing to "Good Content Marketing."

The key to success is not doing something because someone told you that you must do it. Success is achieved by understanding your Customer and delivering. It is that easy. It may not be sexy or the next big thing, but at the end of the day that is where results will come from.

Photo: Dusit / shutterstock