Last Year’s Digital Marketing Skill Set — A Step Out of Time

October 26, 2010 // 1 Comment »

If you own last year’s marketing skill set, you’re simply not competitive as a marketer, and it’s a good bet that your marketing programs aren’t competitive either.

Just look at how much marketing tools like Google Adwords and Marketo have changed — in the last 12 months they’ve been significantly enhanced yet both have probably changed half as much as 2009′s marketing darling — social media. It’s obvious. Marketing is being reinvented before our eyes and transformed by the digital environment surrounding us.

How did you spend the Summer? Let’s say you launched a new website, took your summer vacation, and did a trade show or two. Then Sales wanted a new brochure and a white paper. No doubt you’ve been busy, but maybe you’re not quite up to speed on new capabilities like Revenue Cycle Analytics or Interest-Based Advertising. And, did you make sure your IT team inserted the new Asynchronous Google Analytics tracking code in your website? In less time than it took to complete a baseball season the tools changed significantly and so did the use cases.

This doesn’t mean that as a marketer you can’t and shouldn’t continue what you are doing, and by making the statement I’m not claiming to be immune from having to run hard keep pace. But, as marketers we simply can’t adjust strategy or execution for new capabilities that we don’t know exist, and it’s hard to track them all when you have a full time day job.

To stay at the top of their game marketers probably need to spend 20% or so of their time keeping pace with new developments and understanding the crossovers to other disciplines. In some cases, keeping pace means getting re-certified as a practitioner. And, if the screeches and groans of advertising professionals on the Google Help forum are any indication, (re)certification can be painful. It can also be time consuming and expensive.

But, why should businesses need to pay for learning and experimentation with digital marketing techniques when all they really want are the results from marketing? Strange question coming from a marketer, I know.

In a way analogous to separating the presentation layer from software, should digital marketing be designed out of marketing organizations and into a specialty practice to better serve corporate goals? Clearly I think so, but that’s not the point of this post.

What digital marketing disciplines should be brought in-house as core competencies and which should be outsourced?

What is the blend of in-source and out-source services that maximize total output so the entire ecosystem becomes more efficient?

In an environment where companies hire and shed marketers disproportionately with the upturns and downturns of the economy, can Marketing-as-a-Service find as much purpose and success as Software-as-a-Service?

These are the type of questions I’ll explore in this blog. I hope you will join in a conversation and share your thoughts.

Posted in Open Questions