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How Marketers Can Get Back to Modern Marketing

Authors: Chris Moody Chris Moody
Posted Under: Digital Marketing
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How Marketers Can Get Back to Modern Marketing

Not long ago, Eric Swayne wrote a piece entitled Back to School 2014: A Social AND Shopping Occasion.

His post looked at the whole “back to school” process and mindset from a retail perspective. He took us along as he, like so many of us, made the trek to their favorite retailers to load up their children with all the necessary and obligatory supplies and apparel.

Marketers Go Back to School, Too

Today, however, I want to talk about “back to school” from the perspective of marketers themselves. See, school kids are not the only ones coming off summer vacation. Sure, marketers don’t get to take the entire summer off, at least none that I know of.

But they do get to take a week or two (presumably) off to decompress, unwind, unplug, etc.

And like school kids who more than likely forgot most of what they learned the previous year, marketers themselves perhaps forgot or lost sight of some lessons they learned – not just the previous year but over a much longer time frame.

That was one of the questions posed to a very unique and heretofore unassembled group of marketing educators featured in a new eBook entitled The Marketer’s Backpack.

The esteemed faculty includes educators from some of the finest institutions in the world including:

  • The Wharton School of Business
  • Southern New Hampshire University
  • Valencia College
  • Rutgers University
  • Ball State University

The very first question posed to them was “What’s the #1 thing marketers may have lost sight of over the summer?”

Here’s a random sampling of what the educators had to say:

“It’s not always about the numbers, it’s about the community you are building. Sometimes this can be hard for those outside of social media to understand because of the focus on numbers in regards to marketing.”

“Too many marketing activities are siloed from the top-level business objectives of a company, and are not measured against metrics that others in the company care about.”

“We have seemingly created a digital divide between ourselves and our customers. We tend to treat people differently online than we would treat them in real life.”

Now some of you may be reading this thinking, “I haven’t forgotten about any of this. I know all of this stuff like the back of my hand.”

But something tells me there are others who, whether they want to admit it or not, may have lost sight of some of these “lessons.”

And I am here to say: It’s okay you’re not alone.

Tip O’ The Iceberg

Among the other questions posed to the panel were what their thoughts on the differences between B2B and B2C marketing. Yes, I realize that topic has no shortage of opinions written about it, but to see what leading college professors have to say on the topic is quite different.

Another topic queried, which should be of particular interest to those marketers who will be looking to hire new, right-out-of-school staff in the next few years is what these educators are teaching your future employees and co-workers.

Among the replies were:

“The content that I teach in the classroom is this customer analytics oriented philosophy and associated methods so that the students recognize each customer as a ‘profit center’ and a firm’s ability to be profitable in the long-run relies on maximizing customer value.”

And…

“The newest course I have been teaching is called Social Networking for Job Search, geared to preparing students to find jobs after graduation utilizing various social networking platforms and best practices.”

The eBook offers a fascinating glimpse into the minds the educators who live and breathe marketing just as you do, only they do it in a classroom. Download it here.

Kudos to Steve Olenski (@steveolenski) and all the other Oracle Marketing Cloud folks that made this eBook happen.

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