With London 2012 well underway, Olympic fever has taken over the city and the sheer talent, skill and passion of the athletes is awe-inspiring
Marketers who want to be the best should look to the athletes and take inspiration from them. Helen Glover only started rowing four years ago and won gold in this event for GB. This truly is testament to what hard work and determination can deliver. As a modern marketer who wants to compete and win gold you need to enter the real world of marketing and forget what you learned in the past. You need to build new skills to compete.
Landscape
It’s hard to find a profession that has changed more than marketing. A rapidly changing technological landscape and shifting consumer behavior have eviscerated the marketer’s comfortable command-and-control world of branding, advertising and the four Ps.
A brand is now what Google says it is and your customers seek advice from LinkedIn, blogs, forums and trusted colleagues and friends. Marketers, sales and corporate websites are not in that peer network.
Do you know:
- How your blog is performing?
- Your personal Klout score?
- If your content is up on YouTube, Slideshare, Vimeo and dozens of other places?
- How is your social sentiment trending on Radian6?
- How many SQLs converting?
- How many MQLs did you generate last week/month/quarter?
Regrettably many textbooks and classes have fallen behind the actual practice of marketing. So, the team at Eloqua have assembled this guide to provide you with tips and advice from some of the most successful marketers working today to help you win in today’s real world.
Understand and invest in your personal brand
Thousands of marketers spend countless hours building up organisations brands. They write copy for ads, craft storyboards for videos, maintain blogs and run accounts on social channels like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. But few put the same level and energy and enthusiasm into their personal brands.
People don’t just buy from brands they buy from people. More importantly they want advice, services and even products from people they trust.
Much like any form of banding, personal branding is about marketing. But is shouldn’t be confused with self-promotion. It’s about positioning yourself as an expert in a chosen profession or market by sharing knowledge in a transparent way earning trust with an audience over time.
Dorie Clark, author of the forthcoming ‘What’s Next? The art of reinventing the personal brand’ wrote, personal branding, “is the professional reputation you’ve created- what people say about you when you’re out of the room. Whether or not they recognise it, everyone has a personal brand, so it pays to develop a positive one”.
It’s important for marketers to understand how to build their personal brands, and how those comingle with the companies they work under.
Read Eloqua’s Grande Guide to Personal Branding.
Content is king
People seek valuable information online, while they avoid banner ads and blatant promotional messages. It’s the content that serves as the vital attractor for smart online marketing efforts. Modern online marketers who have a talent for writing search engine friendly content that people love to share are taking charge.
Content marketing is more than the trend du jour. It’s the dedicated practice of delivering compelling, informative content that keeps buyers engaged throughout their trip down the marketing and sales funnel.
Great copywriters, who develop authentic relationships with their audience, are worth their weight in gold. Invest in them and develop your own copywriting skills by writing daily. You never know what assets may be created.
For more information on Content Marketing check out the Eloqua’s Grande Guide to Content Marketing.
The new mathematics of marketing
Marketing involves an element of art. A creative mind is essential however right brain thinking is no longer enough and a fully engaged left brain needs to be bought to the table. Marketers, especially those in B2B Marketing, need to generate demand, manage/nurture leads and pass on high-quality opportunities to sales.
The pressure to provide real data that proves the ROI of marketing’s efforts is at an all-time high. Marketers need to analyse, track, measure and accurately forecast results. Marketers who have the right tools in place and embrace analytics will no doubt be highly successful, respected by their peers and will be competing for gold.
Understand search
There is an underlying rule in marketing and that is: ‘be seen’. If the ‘be seen’ is rule no one then rule no two is ‘rank on positions one-three on Google’ If you are not appearing on the first page of Google then you are too hard to find. You need to create content and understand how that content is discovered in an ecosystem guided by search engines and social networks.
Search is a constantly evolving field. You don’t need to be an SEO master, but you do need a basic understanding of how search functions.
Conclusion
To compete for gold in today’s competitive market place marketers need to constantly learn, adapt and try new things. Like the best athletes in the world hard work and training are a prerequisite to be the best.
