Traditional Marketing....Move Over by Rayanne Thorn

After almost ten years in the recruiting industry as a contract recruiter, retained executive recruiter and corporate recruiter, I joined a recruiting software company as their Marketing Director in the United States.  They had recently launched their US operations after nine years of success and market domination in the UK.  I was thrilled to join this company but also recognized the challenges that lay before me.   In particular, with those that lay with the changing landscape of marketing.

I took several marketing classes when I was in university but none of them addressed how the internet had changed the rules of marketing and even more so, how social media would shatter our ideas of what marketing is or rather was. My traditional definition of marketing is something along the lines of the business of promoting or advertising a company or idea or product or service.  In the past, this has been accomplished by print advertisements, direct mail campaigns, commercials, referral programs or discounts and coupons.  With the onset of email, another advertising option was born.  Email marketing campaigns soon rivaled the best of any junk mail promotion and consumers learned quickly how to mark incoming mail as spam.

Not too long ago, we saw social media become all the rave and start to take the place of traditional marketing.  Advertisers jumped on the bandwagon and created Facebook fan pages and twitter accounts to try and capture the energy of early social media and be in on the ground floor of an incredibly impactful medium.  And what makes it so impactful other than the fact that it is all the rage and its utterly chameleon-like metamorphosis?  It is mostly permission-based.  Meaning, someone has to typically reveal information about themselves, their work, their likes and dislikes and then log in to a portal where they will be marketed to, based upon what they have chosen to reveal about themselves.  In other words, the audience is coming to the marketer, instead of the marketer going out and having to find its audience.

There are other advantages, just as the audience reveals certain characteristics and likes about themselves, so does the marketer.   Here it is:  people like to do business with people they know.  I consider myself to be the company that I work for.  I represent our workforce, every single employee.  I am an extension of our brand, our vision and because of that, there is a face attached to my company, and an underlying personality is made known.  I love what I do.  I love our brand.  I love the company where I work the people with whom I work.  This seeps out in everything I write or release.

And that is the clear advantage of social media; it is called “social media” for a reason.  I used to call it “new media” because employers were more comfortable with that moniker.  Social sounds too much like play and not enough like work.  And how could any good or revenue come out of play?  The bottom line is that marketing has been changed forever.  The days of direct mail/junk mail are numbered.   The need to produce a multi-million dollar commercial to be aired during a major sporting event is over.   Many companies have opted to increase their social media efforts as opposed to creating an expensive ad campaign to beat all ad campaigns. The internet and social media have forever altered how we communicate and resultant of that is an enduring change in how we do business.  Everything you do and say online can now be considered marketing.  Positive or negative.

And you may have heard this before but it’s not going away.