Everything in the field of information technology talks about marketing is not related to reality

The biggest problem with marketing information technology is that too many marketers do not know the basics of marketing.

Online marketers — who, if not marketers, really need to be skeptical enough to know better — have fallen into the trap of meaningless buzzwords.
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First, the phrase “engaging marketing” was invented and popularized in the mid-2000s by HubSpot, which sells - well, of course! - “involving marketing software”, and received unimportant advertising in the form of a book by a former employee of the company Dan Lyons, published on April 5, 2016.

My year in startup hell

Lyons claims and seems to be right that the initial success of the company was, it seems, based on the promotion of the term created by it, and not of the actual product:
The first people hired by HubSpot were the heads of the sales and marketing departments. Halligan and Dharmesh took these positions even though there was no product for sale and it wasn’t even known what they would produce. HubSpot started right away as a trading in product search.

Secondly, the phrase “content marketing” was pompously introduced at about the same time by Mr. Joe Pulizzi. He created the "Institute of Content Marketing", which sells - well, of course, but how else! - “content marketing trainings”, as well as tickets to the World Content Marketing Conference. And what is “content marketing”? The definition in Wikipedia (as of the time of this writing) is a classic example of how to say something, without actually saying anything:

Content marketing is any marketing that involves the creation and distribution of media and published content to attract and retain customers.

The use of these and other buzzwords prompted a new generation of marketers to enter the field of study without knowing even the basic conditions and methods on which our industry rests.

The result is that too many marketers in the information technology field base their work on the wrong assumptions, harming our profession and flooding the Internet with useless “content”. To understand where the marketing community went wrong, let's first compare how the marketing units worked before and after the mass entry of the Internet.


Trends shown by Google

Imagine that now is the 1996th year. What did traditional marketing departments think? Four “P” in marketing: product, price / cost policy, positioning, promotion. A set of measures to promote. Communication strategies. Situational analysis (SWOT analysis). Five competitive forces. Building brands. Then, around 2006, what did the Internet marketing teams think? High rankings on Google and more site traffic. Getting likes on Facebook and Twitter followers. Keyword density. Link building.

"Marketing divisions" used professional strategies, the development of which has been going on for decades. The “online marketing divisions” called themselves “marketers”, but did not even know what every 18-year-old marketing student at business school knows. Two very different teams did two very different things.

Online marketers should ... start doing real marketing and brand building.

However, in subsequent years, online marketing has changed. Google has become better able to cope with manipulative attempts to control the rating. Brands were forced to start paying in order to get some kind of Facebook exit. Most “link to start-ups” sites were simply natural by-products of news coverage and information support efforts, rather than link building, such as search engine optimization, as shown by a study by John Doherty, founder of Credo, published in March 2016 on the site Moz.

Content Marketing is nothing new.

While all these changes were taking place, online marketers were forced to abandon their imitation marketing and begin to engage in real marketing and brand building.

But “engaging marketers” consistently stated — without any proof or confirmation — that “external” strategies, such as advertising, public relations (PR), and informational support, “died”. (See the refutation of these ridiculous statements, written by Martin Keane from the research company Gartner.) After all, they still had to somehow distinguish themselves in order to remain meaningful and keep their staff’s salary, money received from customers, and retain software users. .

And then the Internet marketing community came up with new buzzwords for existing methods to create the impression of something new and different from the old. “Content Marketing” appeared shortly after the online marketers began to utter the most stupid phrase that ever existed in the entire history of marketing:

“Content is king!”

Anyone who needs to be convinced of the truth of such a statement does not have a marketing business.



Content has always been the most important component. These are the persistent commercials of beer ads being shown on TV during the football Super Bowl. This is a shocking video of some publicity stunt distributed via Facebook. This is a “lips-bow” on selfies, which girls in love with themselves spread on Instagram. This is some kind of article added to the mainstream news release (such as, for example, the note you are reading now, which will most likely be ignored in the marketing community, because marketers who are hungry for attention simply have to always say that some “paradigm has shifted” , to build a name for himself on this, even though in reality nothing changes significantly).

If the beer commercial rolls through, everything else doesn't matter. If a publicity stunt does not attract the attention of the public, then everything else no longer matters. If the selfie "lips-bow" does not get so desired "likes" - well, let it be, you go, and not really wanted ...

Marketing has always been the creation of some message, the insertion of this message into some content and the transfer of that content through some channel to some audience in an attempt to create brands, increase demand and pass people through sales funnels. The same is true today - the only difference is that there are two additional sets of available channels, called the Internet and mobile devices, and these channels allow for a greater variety of content formats.

In the 1950s, a marketer could prepare a product report, then place it in a print ad, which would be brought to the audience through a newspaper. Now the marketer can prepare a product report and put it in a video that will be brought through YouTube.

The tools and channels change, but the process remains the same. Content marketers are not doing anything different from what creative teams have always done. In particular, in the SEO community (search engine optimization), an increasing number of services involved in marketing software and internet marketing are beginning to understand the negative effect of buzzwords as they reposition themselves, moving from “SEO” to “marketing”.

In conclusion: all marketing is “content marketing,” since all marketing uses content. Most people who use the universal word "content" are not sure what they exactly do. If this is an advertising publication, say so. If this is promotional material for direct marketing, then so be it. If this is a promotional video, then call it so. Accurate determination of the product being created will help you choose the best methods for its development.

Creativity cannot be measured.

If marketers do not change their approach, then they will continue to treat “content” as “trinkets” of business schools and will continue to mass garbage over the network as they try to provide more and more “content” at an increasingly lower price. But “content” is not a product. Creativity cannot be measured. As Greg Settle wrote in the Harvard Business Review (Harvard Business Review):
We never talk about something that is good “content.” Nobody says after the movie you like: “Glitter! Great content! ”No one hears“ content ”on the way to work in the morning. Do you think anyone could refer to Hemingway, calling him "the author of the content"? If he had found one, then I bet he would get in the eye.
If, for example, what you do is actually advertising, do not call it “content” - be proud that you make advertising for your company or client and make it so impressive that people remember it for many years.

The myth of “engaging marketing”

The entire marketing process that I described above takes place within one or more of the five “constructions” in a set of promotion measures: direct marketing, advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, and informational support. (The promotion package is one of the four “P” marketing mixes: product, pricing / expenditure policy, positioning and promotion.)

My essay on the Moz website

I gave explanations to the four “P”, to the package of measures for the promotion and step-by-step approach to the MarCom strategy in another place, so I will summarize here:

• Direct marketing - sending promotional materials to certain people on the list in order to get a direct immediate response. It includes direct mailing via regular mail, via e-mail and via the most promising advertising channels on the Internet, mobile devices and social networks. (Of course, the bulk of online advertising and advertising via mobile devices is, in fact, as noted by Bob Hoffman of Ad Contrarian, direct marketing, not advertising.)

• Advertising - the use of paid placements in news agencies and channels to increase brand awareness and create associations with the brand among mass audiences.

• Personal selling - using sellers; This strategy is often chosen when companies sell expensive B2C products or B2B products with long sales cycles (a long time for a customer to make a purchase decision).

• Sales promotion - the use of short-term incentives to encourage the purchase or sale of a product or service through discounts and coupons.

• Information support enhances the presence in the public sphere or the awareness of people through the media (own or paid).

I did not specify “engaging marketing” or “content marketing” or “social media marketing” because they are not part of a set of promotion measures and in fact, in general, do not exist.

Any example of these three areas is simply a function of the existing component of the promotion package, but simply under a different name:

• The first fun video from Dollar Shave Club (Dollar Blade) - it was an ad (via YouTube)

• “Cosmic jump” of the energy drink “Red Bull” was not at all “content marketing” - it was
publicity stunt (through various social networks and news channels)

• The famous “Oreo” cookie tweet during the football Super Bowl was not “social networking marketing” - it was a regular PR move (via Twitter channel)

Such examples, by the way, almost always come from brands of mass consumption. It is extremely rare to see high-tech startups doing something like this — this is due to the nature of this industry.

Direct marketing domination

One of the largest marketing sites, Marketing Land (“Country of Marketing”), focuses almost exclusively on direct marketing (under various names):



A word of advice to this publisher: I would cover the direction of advertising, informational support, and sales in such a way that it would attract additional marketers and retailers who are interested in other parts of the promotion package. (Things to think about: I spoke at search optimization and internet marketing conferences for Search Marketing Expo, a subsidiary of Marketing Land, in Silicon Valley and Europe.)

The world of information technology startups prefers direct marketing. Why? Startups live or die based on accurate analytics and growth rates, and direct marketing platforms easily provide these parameters. Google’s recent report on its Analytics 360 Suite service platform is simply a new attempt to respond to a request for this information.

Regardless of whether the desired direct marketing channel is e-mail, Google AdWords or Facebook, all these platforms come with accurate data that allows you to measure the number of entries, likes, clicks and conversions, as well as any resulting purchases, conversions or downloads. A / B and multifactorial tests can be run to eliminate any possible impact on marketing performance.
In addition, marketing automation platforms are simply ways to manage all direct marketing campaigns specifically and effectively from one place — they are not “functionally complete marketing software platforms” because they cannot help with other types of marketing, such as advertising and information campaigns. No automated system and no algorithm is so creative that their result could surprise people.

Information technology marketers, in order to improve their skills, should simply ... read the textbook "Marketing 101".

However, information technology start-ups lack the patience to build strong brands, which, in fact, is what advertising has always done and, to a lesser extent, information support. Marketers seek direct feedback in the form of tracked sales, pickups, downloads and installations as quickly as possible to satisfy impatient investors and potential buyers.

The direct return on investment (ROI) of advertising and information campaigns is extremely difficult to measure with any degree of accuracy, and these investments, as a rule, do not give an immediate return. Infotech representatives are increasingly demanding to require direct marketing indicators for all marketing and PR activities, but it’s difficult to determine direct and direct ROI from brand marketing campaigns.
One example of when people want to get direct marketing indicators, such as “How many customers have we got?”, Is information support activities, such as receiving news coverage or supporting articles for publications. The number of clients coming from the traffic caused by the article is usually small. Direct marketing and informational support are two different things that are used for different purposes for different tasks; Some of the objectives of such articles are to increase brand awareness and ideological leadership (and this cannot be measured). Assigning the wrong tasks to the wrong functions is one of the mistakes that occurs when online marketers do not know the basics of traditional marketing.

The positive side of direct marketing is that it is easy to track its results. The negative is that its construction is rather boring, and obtaining results requires quite aggressive actions.

People tolerate offline advertising; people hate online advertising. Why? Most of the online advertising is actually direct marketing, and people hate direct marketing, whether it's junk in their inboxes, junk e-mail or all sorts of junk, attacking people in social networks or chasing them all over the Internet.
Moreover, for the advertisers themselves, Internet advertising - as I wrote earlier at TechCrunch and discussed more than once, being a marketing speaker at various conferences - is a hotbed of fraud, corruption, invasions of privacy and kickbacks, which is even more amoral than the famous the hero of the television series about advertising agencies Don Draper in his worst version.

How should marketers in the field of information technology

Get back to the basics of marketing! Over the past ten or so years, many information technology marketers have come to this area from technology, and therefore most lack traditional marketing education. That is why they focus on algorithms, discuss the automation of best practices and invent random new terms, rather than thinking about how to build brands with methods that have evolved throughout the past century.

These information technology marketers, in order to raise their qualifications, should simply erase from their memory all these recent blog posts on “engaging” and “content-based” marketing and read the textbook “Marketing 101”. (I would recommend Philip T. Kotler and Gary Armstrong's Principles of Marketing. Tip: buy a second-hand edition released many years ago — save a lot of money.)

Explore direct marketing, advertising and information support strategies as part of a set of promotional measures and then apply these traditional principles to your chosen online and offline channels - be it TV, Facebook, news outlets, Google AdWords or anything else. In essence, this completely changes the “marketing algorithm”, combining the best practices of traditional and online marketing.

Do not separate the team of traditional and online marketing. The more human activity moves into the network, the more traditional and online marketing become just “marketing”. Direct marketing marketers will need to know how to apply best practices in their work offline and online. The same is true for those engaged in advertising, information support and direct sales. A good information support specialist is obliged, for example, to know how to bring a product to national TV and how to distribute it through Facebook.

Explore direct marketing alternatives. Specialists who come to the marketing of technology, are very good at marketing analytics and the corresponding algorithms, but they are not always quite creative. However, advertising such as the one launched by the Dollar Shave Club company mentioned above and information campaigns, such as conducted by the Israeli PR agency Blonde 2.0 for the Yo mobile app, can produce fantastic results.

We in the world of information technologies thought only as specialists in direct marketing for so long that they forgot what it means to be a brand marketer. But remember: how did Apple become the world's most expensive brand? Through television commercials such as "1984" and through print ads like "Think Different."

Always maintain reasonable skepticism. Marketers should be, in principle, the most difficult people who can try to sell something, but even we fall for tricks. Ask yourself: “How much money will this person or this company make by popularizing its idea?” Every time a marketer asserts that “everything has changed” or that something has “died” or that some new buzzword is “future marketing, ask for evidence. Ask for sources and explanations.

In most cases this will be enough.