Is Traditional Marketing Dead?

That's what an article I read in the Harvard Business Review states. While I agree that marketing is certainly changing, and my DVR allows me to fast forward through many commercials, unless I need five minutes to take the dog out or something, I don't think it's quite dead yet. I've been flipping past advertisements in magazines for years, and yet, those magazines still sell advertising.

And the funniest part of the whole blog post was where the author pointed out that "National Instruments used an especially creative approach with its customer influencers, who were mid-level IT managers at the companies they did business with. NI engaged with them by providing powerful research and financial proof points they could take to senior management, showing that NI solutions were creating strategic benefits. That got NI into the C-suite. It also increased the reputation of the mid-level advocates, who were seen as strategic thinkers bringing new ideas to senior management." I'd really like to know who the author thought generated the powerful research and financial proof points. It certainly wasn't the sales team, not that they couldn't do it. It was the marketing team, and that's what they do.

So, no, marketing isn't dead. Any piece of paper you are handed at a tradeshow, any dvd, handout, slide presentation, and any number of things mailed to your home, are created by a marketing department somewhere, even if the marketing department is just one person. Website design? Marketing. The copy on your website? Hopefully marketing, and someone who can spell without using spell check. That white paper the C-level suite wanted so they could showcase themselves as experts in their field? Definitely marketing.

I do agree with one point the author made, and that is the fact that marketing ROI has many different calculations related to determining how successful a campaign is or was, and these calculations don't necessarily translate well to any accounting balance sheet or any other generally accepted financial metric used to calculate monetary value. The old marketing rule of thumb is that if you have a system in place to track where your customers are coming from, you can tell which campaigns work, and which ones don't. If there isn't a system in place, then yes, marketing is likely just a crapshoot.

It's getting easier and easier to track incoming customers, however, and how they came to you. Google Analytics will tell you were your blog and website readers are coming from, for instance, and they'll even tell you the keywords used to find you. And that's just one tool. I've used Salesforce.com in the past, and it's pretty easy to tell how the customer got to you, and then relay that to the sales rep so they know, too. It's teamwork, and when it works between the marketing department and the sales department, company sales are probably showing organic and inorganic growth.

Marketing isn't dead yet, and funnily enough, neither is print, despite the last ten years of everyone saying it is.