The rapid incorporation of digital approaches has made marketing an industry of silos. It’s time to rethink the way we build our teams and our skill sets to break those walls apart.
Source: moz.com
How is Marketing structured in your company?
I’ve been thinking about how this translates to SMBs as obviously not every company has to do “government relations”. But whether the Marketing team is big or small, there are interesting distinctions made in this slide in terms of the skills they represent. For instance:
– Strategy is not execution. Some people are good at one but not necessarily at the other.
– Creative and audit / analytical skills are very different: very few people combine them both.
Samuel Scott makes other great points in this post such as not differentiating between offline and online tasks or breaking down silos which I couldn’t agree more: many companies are starting to realize for instance that content marketing needs social media and vice versa whereas they used to be treated differently and sometimes even isolated.
But what’s striking to me in the way he breaks down tasks is that it’s very hard for a small marketing team to combine all these skills and experience.
Many SMBs are therefore constrained by the talents they have to limit themselves to a number of strategies without realizing the full potential they could have on their market. I was discussing for example with one of my friends earlier today who told me his company wasn’t blogging (at least not on a regular basis and beyond company announcements) because he didn’t have creative people in his marketing team (they mostly focus on SEM and digital ads). And yesterday I was discussing with one of our customers and she was telling me it took them a year before they started to have everything (resources and tools) in place to be able to publish content on a regular basis.
The long-term answer to that problem seems to me in finding leverage through more fluid approaches. Chances are you won’t be able to recruit all the above skill set in a small team. But chances also are that freelancers can help or that you can leverage other people’s content as well. Companies like Uber are showing us how the economy is moving to become “on demand”. Marketing will also be impacted by that and we could be moving to on-demand Marketing fast:
– Marketing talents on demand through platforms like Doz.
– Outsourced content on demand through platforms like Scripted, Express Writers or Visually.
– Curated content on demand through platforms like Scoop.it.
The majority of the economy is driven by SMBs that need flexibility and can’t recruit permanently all the talents they need. Does it mean the future of marketing will be on-demand?
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading...