Hey Marketers: Time to remember what makes us great (and valuable)
This post was originally published on The PinTale Blog
Let’s be honest marketers: 2023 was a pretty crazy year.
The marketing landscape is shifting, mainly due to tightening budgets and generative AI. I would wager that most of us marketers have taken full advantage of these “generative” content tools, but at the same time our companies’ strategies haven’t shifted as quickly to incorporate the value that AI is bringing to the table.
We have gotten a front row seat to witness the impact AI has had. If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably had a moment or two where you’ve wondered how this new technology will affect our livelihoods.
Are marketing jobs literally at risk due to the advent of AI?Personally, I have spent the better part of the last 15 years building traffic at companies using content and SEO as core tactics.
So what’s next and where are we headed?
Let’s take a look back, before we move forward together:
Before the advent of the internet, advertising ruled marketing, the majority in print form. From magazines and newspapers, to billboards. Beyond print, a fixed universe of radio and TV airtime were the only games in town.
In this era, marketers relied far more heavily on positioning and story-telling. They had to. If your only medium is a 20 second audio clip on the radio, you better tell a compelling (and concise) story that gets the listener’s attention. The best marketers of this day were masters of story telling. Painting a picture in your mind of their vision of the you that you could be if you had their product in your life.
Enter the internet, and with it, the world of marketing would be largely re-defined, as consumers spent more time online and less time on TV and reading periodicals. In the beginning, it was largely the domain of the consumer channel. In time, the internet became our medium for information across the board. We all know the story. We’ve lived it.
For the past 20 years, Google has owned marketing. Exponentially so for B2B marketing.
Internet search singlehandedly replaced many legacy marketing channels, including the yellow pages, billboards, radio ads, etc… rendering them expensive options nearly impossible to track in terms of their effectiveness and ROI.
From a single search results page, traffic would flow to the websites of business who created the best and most optimized content.
And the best part? Most of that traffic was essentially free. So we marketers leaned into it hard.
A ~$70 billion industry was born: “SEO,” and with it many other categories were also born, including one that myself and my co-founders spend time and energy building: inbound marketing — a term that was coined in the early days of HubSpot.
But along the way, many marketers, myself included, forgot about the most important fundamentals of marketing: the positioning and storytelling that once made Mad Men (and Women) the kings and queens of Madison Avenue.
Tactical and technical growth in the internet age of Google and Amazon allowed us to start with the tactics instead of the story, so storytelling fell by the wayside as a result, especially in B2B. You no longer had to be a master storyteller to get the eyeballs you needed. An entire industry of tools sprouted up to support marketers going deeper and deeper into “Performance Marketing.” Budgets shifted, and before we knew it Brand Marketing was that side of B2B marketing, which got the leftover budget after the CFO rolled their eyes and caved in.
As a marketer, it can become easy to lose sight of the bigger company picture, as long as your metrics are good and growing. As long as traffic is converting at 3%, I can keep my leads converting into customers at 10%, right?
Sales? That’s a volume play, right? If our conversion rates are consistent, then we’ll continue to drive more leads and win deals, so I’m going to just keep driving traffic and leads. Not many will admit it when asked, but the funnel for most companies is mostly about quantity, not quality. Thats OK though right? We’re hitting targets. Maybe …
We got so caught up in driving traffic and converting leads that we forgot how powerful product positioning is in our effort to sell products, and marketers and marketing team budgets are suffering as a result.
We forgot that at its best, marketing leads a go-to-market strategy. At its best, marketing is the central artery of the company story. At its best, sales people are clamoring for a better story from the marketing team, because the best sales teams know that it’s the story that sells. Alas, have we lost the stories with the shift in attention and wallet to the tactical side?
What happens in a world where the SEO spigot starts to dry up? A reckoning perhaps…
