While the increasing speed of change is not new, how we market around it is.  Today, marketers have two key responsibilities: the ‘today’ marketing of today’s products and services, and the ‘today’ discovery of tomorrow’s products and services. Unfortunately, because of the very real pressure to drive current quarter sales, most marketers focus exclusively on the today.  Tomorrow is someone else’s problem.

Where do you spend your organization’s budget?  Should it be on communications, or on training?  Should it be on infrastructure, or on people?  Inside the organization, or to partners?

While these may all be good questions, there is merit on reframing it – especially when it comes to questions around growth.

Most marketers think of themselves as builders. Their work grows the organization, grows market share, grows the portfolio of products and services. A bit more tactically, the marketer builds page views, conversions, and social engagement; underlying all of these activities, the marketer builds trust, and builds relationships.

But is there merit in growing marketing itself? Not the ad spend or departmental head count, but the number of simultaneous marketing initiatives that the organization can successfully run?

Have you ever considered why some of your content resonates, and some seems just a bit off? Too often emails – especially ones that form part of a marketing automation sequence – fail because of one thing: voice.

With so many people and organizations getting on the blogging and podcasting bus, it seems that blogging must be very important. But why? Deciding on a strategy helps clarify the underlying purpose of the content itself, and provides focus to the creative process.

Who do you prefer being – the host or the guest?

When you are asked to be a guest at an event, it is a validation of your skills, experience, and your importance. Of course, being a guest has it’s obligations: if the invitation is a personal one, you often will bring a small gift. If it’s professional, you are expected to contribute your professional attention to the purpose of the event.

At its core, the rationale for market research is to help make better decisions.  Market research can discover, validate, and reduce risk.  It can improve ROI, improve management confidence, and expose competitive threat.  And it can also be the worst thing that an organization can do.

Even when done perfectly, traditional market research – both qualitative (focus groups, interviews, etc) and quantitative (surveys) – has one inherent flaw:  it takes time. 

Today, we see digital marketing techniques (such as “squeeze-pages”) that also presume too much:  How many sites have you seen that exhort the reader to “Sign up for our promotional newsletter, and we’ll give you a free ebook.”

Unfortunately, this approach is completely backwards:  the marketer is asking for something – your contact details – without earning the right to do so.  Even worse, they are trying to bribe you (the so-called ethical bribe) to participate!  If the goal is to build trust, the “transaction” must be completely different: First give, then get.

What do houses, cars, and Social Media all have in common?  For one thing, they all share a primary question:  Buy or Rent.  Buy a house, or look for a rental?  Buy a car, or lease it?  And should we rent our Social Media, or build our own?

Most leaders don’t even think about this last question, because they don’t consider that Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube (and in fact, every Social Media site) is rented space.

Does the trend to digital mean that traditional communications are effectively… dead?  That all of your traditional communication tools (newsletters, magazines, brochures, booklets, etc) are destined for the trash heap?  

One only needs to look at the sorry plight of the newspaper business to see that the future doesn’t look rosy. The world has changed.