What are the priorities of today’s multi-tasked marketer?

modern marketer 2

It was a pleasure being the first guest on my good friend, Mark Masters, new podcast You Are The Media (there’s also a conference lined up for 2018). One sentence backstory, Mark and I spent 2 years sharing 140+ episodes of our own podcast, Marketing Homebrew.

During the podcast we discussed the role of the modern marketer. The growth marketer. Are we still following the rulebook set from pre-digital days? Are we taking advantage of the new found opportunities that all these new channels and technology provide us?

Mark’s own work emphasises the role content marketing takes in helping businesses build and inspire their own audience. It’s a hugely viable plan of attack that helps position brands in the minds of their consumers. It provides the marketer with a role. It provides marketing with a suitable objective.

But what about you?

My own work focuses in on the opportunity marketing technology provides ecommerce marketers. To use the tools and software available to us to help more people to buy.

As marketer’s our role is multi-tasked. We’re constantly learning ‘on the job’. We’re constantly aware of the work of our competitors. We’re constantly aware of the shifting patterns in our own buyer’s behaviours.

There’s a lot on our plate.

At the same time, we’re tasked to get to grips with the marketing technology that helps drive our ecommerce growth. There’s no instruction manual for that.

How do you make the time to do the work and learn your trade?

Through the years I’ve sat with 100’s of marketers to help them improve real business results. The first port-of-call is to understand how they’re spending their time right now. How is their role aligned with their brief? To win and retain more customers more profitably. Where is time spent that could be better spent in the future?

A vast majority of time is spent tweaking. And then reporting upon the impact of those tweaks.

  • Bidding on new keywords (with very little search volume)
  • Dispatching newsletters (that pretty much say the same thing on repeat)
  • Keeping suppliers sweet with new homepage promotions (when the real selling is done on the product page)
  • Tweeting new product launches (when less than 10% of followers actually see the tweet and a majority of those simply will not care)

There are far far better ways that you can be spending your time.

The Growth Marketer – The T-Shaped Marketer

Marketing demands process. Streamlined process. Optimised process. A process that is defined and centred upon the customer. That old cliche. But it’s so true. We rarely see it actioned.

Smart marketing also demands personalisation. When you read that the top 1% of your customers are worth 18 times more than the average customers? It opens your eyes to how you build upon the relationships that yield such results. You have to be on top of your game. At all times. As Brian Solis shared, Extreme personalization is the new personalization

To personalise you need to learn how to segment. To automate in timely fashion. To identify and learn the tools that allow us to achieve personalisation. Scott Brinker summed it up nicely in his book Hacking Marketing, ‘Software is also our hands by which we touch our audience through a digital channel.

We also need to engage the right side of our brains to create copy that:

  1. is empathetic
  2. is believable
  3. is likeable
  4. motivates people to take action.

Yes, there’s a whole load of creativity needed too.

Then we have to connect the dots. Each touchpoint on our buyer’s journey. To educate and persuade our website visitors.

…and then there’s the justification of our time, our budget, our salary.

How do we instil confidence in those around us that marketing is driving business in the right direction? When everyone around us has a view, how do you assure those people that you’re in a position of strength? A fountain of knowledge on the buying habits of your customers (whilst still making profit)?

It’s a big task

We could have spoken for hours on the subject, just like I could have kept writing right now… But we did our best to keep the conversation to 20 minutes. Here’s Mark & I chatting about the role and duty of today’s modern marketer…

 

 


Written By:
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Ian Rhodes

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First employee of an ecommerce startup back in 1998. I've been using building and growing ecommerce brands ever since (including my own). Get weekly growth lessons from my own work delivered to your inbox below.

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