Online Branding Education

I have created two new online brand management courses: (1) Positioning Your Brand to Win! and (2) Brand Research. If you have a couple hours to spare and want to dive deeply into these two topics, click on the links to begin your education.

How to Remain a Leading-Edge Marketer Throughout Your Career

I have been a marketing practitioner for 38 years. And I am happy to report that my skill set has kept up with the latest marketing concepts and technologies. So, how do I stay abreast of the latest developments? Here is my list of the things that one can do to stay current:

• Hold a variety of marketing positions over time - I held positions in product management, new product development, trade marketing, brand management, brand licensing, advertising, promotion, media planning, marketing research, CRM, corporate communications and marketing management
• As a consultant, help other companies solve their marketing problems - I have helped more than 200 organizations in 60+ industries develop successful brand strategies
• Read every new marketing, marketing research, customer service, psychology and behavioral economics book that is published
• Read as many other genres as possible
• Go to marketing conferences and take lots of notes
• Speak at marketing conferences
• Attend marketing webinars and take lots of notes
• Develop marketing webinars
• Watch marketing "how to" videos on YouTube and Vimeo
• Take marketing e-learning courses
• Volunteer to help not-for-profit organizations with their marketing
• Teach marketing as an adjunct professor at a local college or university
• Conduct marketing seminars at a local library
• Develop and produce marketing e-learning courses
• Publish a marketing blog - so far, I have written 1,460 posts for three different marketing blogs
• Create a marketing-related YouTube channel
• Create a marketing podcast
• Become a guest on other people's podcasts
• Interview CMOs for your podcasts, videos and blog posts
• Write a book on marketing
• Write marketing-related articles for professional journals
• Volunteer to judge marketing competitions
• Join the local chapter of the American Marketing Association
• Join the local chapter of PRSA
• Join the American Advertising Federation
• Network with other marketers
• Create and publish a marketing industry survey to identify the latest marketing trends and issues
• Create websites and manage social media for your favorite hobbies and organizations - I manage five different Facebook pages for five different organizations in which I am involved
• Make sure you understand social media marketing, mobile marketing, CRM, email marketing, marketing automation, geofencing, retargeting and OTT and CTV marketing
• Use Chat-GPT in a variety of ways to make sure you understand it

This list may seem overwhelming but true experts never stop learning. They relentlessly explore deeper and deeper into every aspect of their field of expertise. And they do the same with closely related fields of expertise. This is how one becomes a world-class marketer.

I hope this provides you with some ideas of how you can stay at the top of your game throughout your marketing career.

 

Social Media & Digital Marketing

I am an older guy. I was on the forefront of the revived brand management movement in the mid-to-late 1990s. And I have ridden it out until the present. I was also an early user of the Internet - going as far back as 1976 when it was primarily a military communication vehicle (ARPANET). Further, I was on the ground floor of coding, learning Fortran, COBOL and basic assembler language in college. When I was at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) in New York, I was an expert in reading binary code, hexadecimal code and core dumps to identify coding errors. I had an online newsletter before there were blogs and I started a few of the first marketing-oriented blogs. And, I have kept up with web design, SEO, content marketing, social media marketing (Google, Facebook, et al.), digital marketing, mobile marketing, CRM, data analytics, email marketing, marketing automation, CTV/OTT, geofencing, retargeting, podcasts, YouTube channels, etc.

I share this background to indicate that I am grounded in both classical marketing and branding concepts and techniques and the most recent tools and advances in social media and digital marketing. I am not just speaking from one of these two perspectives. And I am not a luddite.

Here is my point. Social media and digital marketing are overrated. Brands and enterprises have become over reliant on them. Why? They are modern - the latest "shiny objects." They are relatively inexpensive. And, most importantly, you can track and measure their results (which cannot be said of many other marketing components).

However, while they have their place in the marketing mix, here is what they continue to lack - the human touch, relationship building, peer-to-peer marketing, real world publicity stunts, and the power of a good salesperson to close a sale.

Yes, over time, blog posts, podcasts and YouTube and Vimeo videos can create a certain level of trust, emotional connection and thought leadership. And, there are ways to make digital content go viral, especially to an extent that cannot be achieved otherwise. However, more "high touch" marketing tactics must be kept in the marketing mix to create a truly integrated and powerful marketing campaign. 

When a person only knows how to use a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When marketers only know social media and digital marketing, the primary marketing vehicle becomes digital by default.

To have a fully rounded marketing campaign that is highly effective, generally you need the following marketing components: target market definition and segmentation, marketing research for customer insight, marketing strategy and plan development, graphic design, videography, copywriting, media planning and placement, media relations and publicity and social media and digital marketing expertise. 

I have witnessed more and more companies with limited resources relying solely on social media and digital marketing to achieve their marketing goals - often with lackluster results. This is not always the case, but it is often the case. 

If I were to start a marketing campaign with very limited resources, I would start with media relations and publicity including proactive publicity and carefully crafted publicity stunts. In today's world, this would include social media and digital marketing. But social media and digital marketing wouldn't be the only components of such a campaign.

So, my core message in this blog post is that while social media and digital marketing are likely to be components of your integrated marketing campaign, they should not be the sole or dominant components of that campaign.