Hidden Targets

According to a recent Hubspot blog post, what's the #1 thing clients look for in their agency partners? It's not results, budget, strategy, or even great creative. According to the Society of Digital Agencies, it is expertise in emerging trends. 

There are many tools that can help spot trends such as Google Trends for search, Trendsmap for Twitter, and YouTube Trending just to name a few. These tools use social media and search as their primary sources while other services like Trendwatching use crowdsource with feet-on-the-street to spot new consumer trends. Identifying trends and having the ability to pivot quickly to take advantage of these trends is an ongoing challenge.

Marketing is rapidly becoming one of the most technology-dependent functions in the business. With more than 5000 marketing technologies and tools on the market today, many providing overlapping functionality, CMOs are continually challenged to align marketing technology with business goals as well as evaluating and choosing the tools their organization needs to execute and optimize their marketing programs.  This infographic was developed by Scott Brinker at Chiefmartec.com. As you can see, Martech today is very overwhelming.

As I was reading this article this morning in the WSJ, This Tech Bubble Is Bursting, I couldn’t help but to think about Martech. Marketing has always been a marriage of art and technical execution but over the past several years, marketers have been inundated with new marketing technologies. In fact, marketing is becoming one of the most technically complex functions in business today.

I love working in fractured markets. Communicating in fractured markets is my idea of “professional fun” - it appeals to my competitive spirit.  These types of markets provide the best opportunities to establish strong leadership positions.

So many people believe public relations begins and ends with a press release. Nothing could be further than the truth. In fact, a press release is just one of the tactics that public relations employs to tell your story and amplify your message. I find that many of my contemporaries are writing about these newer tactics such as social media and content marketing. These are subjects that all marketers should understand but what makes a successful marketing program is the orchestration of a number of tactics into a cohesive integrated program that has been developed to achieve a specific business objective.