A marketer’s dilemma.

My job is amazing. I get to work with companies of all sizes. Small, medium and large. I get to work with amazing people. Engineers who have developed big medical devices long before the internet and social media ever existed. Marketing managers at well-established, decades-old companies trying to navigate this new world. And, I’m surrounded by brilliant minds that are focused on marketing. My job is also a challenge. And, no, don’t ask me why. Because I don’t know that there is one reason for that. Some of it is technical: figuring out marketers’ new, tech-centric, complex needs and coming back for more advice. Some of it is the impact of a now-unbound medium on the world of communication: now that communication is in constant flux, we’re forced to adapt but we don’t know where we’re going. And some of that is the all-too-common, we-are-all-doing-it-wrong discussion. That last bit is what I’d like to focus on. It’s common to think that marketing “in the old days” was easy. All you had to do was produce some content, go buy some marketing space (TV, magazine, website, etc) and you’re done. No, it wasn’t easy. It wasn’t even fun. But, it was simpler. There were only a few channels and, consequently, only a few types of ads. Yes, you could get away with running some crappy nothing-to-see-here campaign. You could get away with it but, even then, you’d probably see it backfiring. Back then, doing great marketing meant doing a few things, really, really well. Today, that’s not enough. It’s simply not good enough. Marketers used to compete with other marketers. But, thanks to the internet, everyone has access to the same tools and the same channels. So, marketers now compete with every other company in the world that has an internet connection. That’s good. It’s healthy. It’s competitive. And, it’s complicated. But, the once-clear differentiation between marketing and everything else is gone. And, the “I have no idea what they’re talking about” or “I’m sorry, I don’t do that” reactions are from marketers. They’re from marketers, people. Who used to spend 90% of their time doing marketing. Now, they spend 90% of their time doing...well, stuff. Because, they do marketing now. Marketing is no longer the ownership of a few specialized people. That does not mean that marketing is easy nor that everyone should do it. But it does mean that every company, every entrepreneur, every startup, every organization solicits advice from marketing people. The days of one message, one channel, one campaign are gone. Marketers have to adapt. And, sometimes, their advice might sound weird or inconvenient, but that’s only because marketers are here to make your life easier. Because, they want to better understand your business and help you achieve your goals.

We, marketers, used to be bad.

Then, we noticed that marketing was interesting, too. But, now, we’re the best ones to ask. We may no longer be the primary driving force of demand or growth but we are no longer just overhead.

We are, once again, invaluable.