Great marketers have an arbitrage opportunity
There's a significant arbitrage opportunity for great marketers: education and fundamentals.
As marketing moves out of the performance era (2008-2024) toward a balanced mix of long-term brand building and short-term direct response (sales activation) activities, there is a significant arbitrage opportunity for great marketers and forward looking executives.
This became even more evident when I recently read a post on LinkedIn from the CEO of a well-regarded data reporting SaaS company.
It feels like we've reached some type of tipping point in B2B [SaaS] marketing where there's a whole new set of complimentary tactics that everyone is doing.
Tactics. No mention of strategy. There's the first indication that for all the talk about brand and "tipping points" in marketing, the focus is still short-term, on the doing, and not on the customer. Ritson was correct about the tactification of marketing.
This feels like inbound did in 2008 when SEO, blogging, social, lead generation, lead nurturing/email marketing (a bit later) came together. These were all things that were around for awhile, but not put together in a process or doable in one piece of software, until HubSpot came along.
Process. Software to do it all. There's nothing wrong with technology per se. There is an inherent problem with thinking that marketing can be reduced to automation. There's a problem putting technology before people, before process, and before strategy. It's literally backwards to how great companies operate.
What should this be called? Do we need one piece of software that enables it all? Is it something that companies should even own or should it all just happen on 3rd party platforms? How do we measure it all?
Not everything new needs to be named, especially when it isn't new. Everything doesn't need to be measured, because it can't.
We should stop measuring device data and metadata exclusively and instead use a balanced mix that measures how humans actually behave. The ad may have been served, but did anyone pay attention?
The arbitrage opportunity is surprisingly simple and mundane.
It involves strategy, differentiation, and distinctiveness.
It requires positioning, messaging, and looking outward to the market. Not inward at our products or sales organization.
It requires a 180 degree flip from what we think is happening, to listening and empathizing with humans so that we know what is happening.
It is simply, marketing. Because unfortunately well-trained and experienced marketers are uncommon.