Traditional Marketing Traditional Marketing was governed by the 4 P’s: Product, Place, Promotion and Price. That translated into activities such as market segmentation, pricing, advertising, branding, distribution, product marketing, positioning & messaging, market research, marketing communications and events marketing. Table stakes Marketing You can’t escape table stakes marketing once you have customers or are selling to new ones. It revolves around demand generation (leads, referrals), customer marketing (success stories, references, testimonials, product reviews), and account-based marketing. Fading Marketing These methods are either becoming ineffective or less applicable. Email marketing, outbound marketing, interruption advertising and direct mail marketing. Digital Marketing That’s where the growth is. Gamification, SEO/SEM, social (media & networks) marketing, advocate marketing, inbound marketing, customer analytics, mobile marketing, video, content marketing, e-commerce (if applicable), marketing automation tools and real-time marketing.

THE NATIVE MARKETING TRAP

How about tech startups? Most tech startups are digital natives, and so is the predominance of their marketing. But it’s a blessing and a warning. Yes, they understand digital marketing and some have never heard of, or done traditional marketing. The CEO/founder is typically the first CMO until a VP of Marketing emerges. But there is a risk when they start to focus entirely on digital marketing and ignore the other facets of marketing. I’m calling this pitfall the “native marketing trap”, i.e. staying online and marketing solely via growth-hacking techniques, user activity and analytics data while your business model is also online. Yes, the data granularity is good, and you can make plenty of decisions on that, but that’s not enough. Plus, you’re tempted to stay there because native marketing is relatively cheap, and you start to get a false sense of comfort given the ROI’s you get. As a startup, if you rely entirely on native digital marketing, you will have blind spots and you will have weak spots. It’s OK to start just with native marketing, especially if your user growth keeps you busy enough, as you might think, “we’re growing users like crazy, – why do we need additional marketing?” And you start to believe that “marketing is for sucky products”, despite the “bug report on that allegation“. I’m seeing signs of the native marketing trap with several B2C or consumerized B2B Internet companies that religiously follow their users fingerprint and forget about the other range of marketing activities that are meant to solidify their position in the marketplace. That’s the key blindspot they fall into. Native marketing helps your users, but not your market position necessarily.

OUTSOURCE THE CIO, NOT THE CMO

If you’re a CEO, and you need to pick between the CMO or the CIO and you only have one choice, what would you do? Answer: Keep the CMO and outsource the CIO. A CMO’s job can’t be outsourced. It is becoming too strategic. A CIO’s job can be outsourced, just like much of what IT does. Unfortunately, the cloud has thrown the CIO out along with the legacy apps, and it made the CMO more powerful because they can find a SaaS app for almost any function or priority they have. Reality? Check. It’s a great time to be in Marketing. That’s where I’m seeing a lot of emerging innovation that will impact the growth of businesses, whether you’re a startup, a medium-sized or a large company. And if you’re a marketer with both traditional and digital marketing skills or experience, you’re the only ones with a 360 visibility on marketing.