“Dinosaurs” in the world of marketing

If your marketing professional looks like the photo above, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

And no, this is not a species-ist diatribe against dinosaurs. There are numerous red flags in the photo of the marketing professional above to the business-savvy professional. Let’s dig a little deeper.

• If your marketing professional is using a box monitor, they’re probably late-adopters of technology. The last person in, or working with, your business that should be a late-adopter of tech is your marketing professional/personnel. Keeping a good pulse on tech simply results in a more effective marketing campaign. In addition to a marketing luddite not being able to deliver results with the most recent and relevant marketing practices, odds are, they are working with high levels of inefficiency. These marketing dinosaurs seem blissfully unaware to their inevitable replaceability.
• That pencil is as ancient in business as fire is to man. There are simply far too few uses for the pen-and-paper methodology in modern business. While good old-fashioned paper isn’t entirely irrelevant, it is statistically proven that professionals with the ability to type (which is a requirement in almost every line of work in modern times) can record more relevant information at a faster pace.
• The telephone shares a similar status to the one described for pen-and-paper above: while not irrelevant, the telephone sees far less use-case and is woefully inefficient relative to modern methods. In context of business, it is simple to understand the difference in efficiency of phone versus email use: imagine asking somebody to send the same message to 25 individuals. One email blast can handle your request in a fraction of the time. Do you really want to pay somebody to place 25 phone calls in a situation like this? We didn’t think so. In addition to being woefully (and perhaps even willfully) inneficient, your technophobic marketer is destroying your customer relations (do they even know what a CRM is?) by annoying your customers: phone calls are seen as a nuisance in most business cases.

Whether you are a medium or large business with dedicated marketing personnel, or a smaller business that might look to outsource their marketing efforts to digital marketing companies, selecting your marketing professional(s) is one of the most important business decisions you will make. Knowing which questions to ask in order to assess their competence and relevance in the modern marketing market can spell the difference between having thousands of more customers (thanks to, for example, a phenomenal SEO effort) and losing thousands of customers by annoying them with techniques of the ancients.

A good place to start assessing marketing personnel is their social media competence. Contrary to the belief of dinosaurs, Facebook is not just for kids, and Instagram is not a delivery service. While this may blow the minds of the marketing “professionals” (do professionals really choose inefficiency?) the truth is inarguable: social media is one of the largest, and in many cases the largest, lead funnel in businesses. The days of outsourcing marketing efforts to conduct snail-mail and billboard campaigns are almost extinguished, replaced almost entirely with social media campaigns that can more effectively target demographics susceptible to patronizing your business, resulting in far more cost efficiency.

Even the most notorious of technophobes know how to conduct a Google search. No matter what industry you are in, having a well-conducted and strategic SEO plan can assure your business gets the exposure it needs to capture the largest customer segment. Ask any passerby if they know where to find any service or product: if they don’t know, it’s wagerable the first thing they would do is “Google it.” Being at the forefront of a Google search can be accomplished with several marketing methodologies, and if your prospective (or hopefully not current) marketing personnel can’t rattle these off, you can be doing a lot better with your marketing. The answer is a combination of SEO and SEM. Again, and par for the course, if your marketing personnel don’t know the difference between SEO and SEM: you can be doing better. A competent marketing professional has an understanding of both SEO and SEM; a great marketing professional can perform both.

In business, you’re busy, and don’t want to (nor should you have to) hold the hand of your marketing personnel. Traditional marketing techniques were often hard to quantify in terms of results, with high levels of variance if even conducted at all. Digital marketing, on the other hand, almost always has methodologies to track all aspects of your campaigns, including click rates of ads and conversions or other actions on your website. Marketing analytics is a must-have skill of your marketing personnel so you can quickly view how they are performing without lengthy conversations and guesswork.

Micromanaging and the endless meetings they entail: the bane of business. Do you want to be forced with the choice of either being in the dark about your marketing campaigns or devoting endless hours to meetings and inquiries? That was a trick question: modern competent marketing professionals alleviate this Fool’s Choice via social media calendars, providing you an easy oversight of all digital marketing efforts. This includes social media posts (on what platform and when) as well as email blasts, providing you a precise date and time, at a glance.

Sorry, dinosaurs: but the business-savvy folks that read this article might make you extinct sooner than later.

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