What skills marketers should possess in this ever changing digital era?

I had an opportunity to attend an innovative social media management platform launch event. This so-called “social media management tool for dummies” was designed for SMB business owners who have little social media management experiences and/or resident skills. The powerful tool will solve all headaches in the process of managing social media. What impressed me the most was that it can provide easy to follow action plans to improve the effectiveness of all social media channels based on backend complicated big data analysis. With the rapid development of new technology and maturity of big data analysis, I started to contemplate as to what skills, marketers should possess in this ever changing digital era.

Oliver Emberton described a human’s brain likened to a beach volleyball which contains numerous bees flying to all directions. Marketers today are overwhelmed in various online and offline campaigns and pull out their hair to figure out best practices and actionable plans to achieve demanding business goals embedded in an environment of substantial data and reports. In my opinion, focus is one of the most important skills marketers should possess. Oliver created a formula that illustrates the correlation between your achievement and your direction.

Your achievement = your potential/your directions ²

Focus/concentration is taking our mind off many things and putting it on one thing at a time.  One of the tips to control our mind according to Oliver is to take notes when we don’t really need to. For example, when we read books, taking notes would make our mind to focus on the content of what we read.

The second most important skill that marketers should have is creativity. When a reporter asked Albert Einstein do you remember the speed of sound in air. Einstein said that he needed to look for the information because he would never remember things that could be easily found via a simple search. Problem solving relies on the ability to think and creativity is much more significant than knowledge itself.

Michael Michalko, one of the highly acclaimed creative experts in the world

provided 7 ways to think creatively. Let’s take the following scenario as an example to explain his creative method:

May has a dog whose left eye is blind.

1. Think from a different angle - I am a dog whose left eye is blind. My master is Mary.
2. Visualize our thoughts - Mary always feeds her dog from the right side because her dog’s left eye is blind.
3. Practice the thoughts and learn from the process - Mary is sitting on a chair. Her dog tries to jump on her laps using its right side of the body because its left eye is blind.
4. Integrate different things together - Some of Mary’s friends seldom visit her because they are afraid of her dog whose left eye is blind.
5. Form some never happened relationship - Mary once took her dog to visit Jack and found out that Jack’s cat’s left eye is also blind, just like her dog.
6. Think reversely - if Mary’s dog’s left eye has no problem, Mary won’t need to spend a lot of time to take special care of the dog.
7. Think abstractly - When people face politics, they are like Mary’s dog. One eye can see, but the other eye is always blind.

Six branding strategies that built well-known brands

When it comes to branding, coca-cola is one of the most mentioned names, thanks to its mysterious ingredients. Human beings are interested in difference from other brands, but are even more interested in the mystery.

Here is a summary of the six branding strategies that have created strong brand names:

1. Keep secret and legal

Although coca-cola prints the ingredients of its beverage on each can/bottle, as required by law, it is legal to keep their secret recipe locked in a safe behind a thick bank vault door.  They have built this most extraordinary well-known brand for 129-year period.

     2. Scarce value

I on one occasion had a business dinner with a Chinese client from Kunming, He was generous enough to invite me to taste one of the most expensive teas in China - Puerh tea. The one I tasted cost approximately $500 Canadian dollars per gram. The most expensive one can go as high as $925 per gram.  I am a tea drinker and have tasted many kinds of high-quality teas, but I sipped it very carefully when I tasted that particular cup of tea. An exceptional tea!

3. Sell suspense

Do you remember Paul’s (the octopus) predictions at the 2010 World Cup? Although the world cup was hosted in Africa, Germany used Paul the octopus to advertise/promote the cup, and successfully attracted world’s attention. Can an octopus really predict the outcome? Here,  the suspense and curiosity played a huge role to generate public interests.  

Suspense to some degree, creates a sense of unpredictability and urgency. Zara knows how to leverage the unpredictability to boost the sales. They don’t carry a large inventory. They educate customers. For example, if you don’t buy this T-shirt today,  you may not be able to get the same style tomorrow.

4. Tell a story

I have heard many versions of how the name of “DOVE” came about. Whether “DOVE” stands for the love of a great father for his son, or the love of a man to his lover is not so important. The critical part is that we all remembered that “DOVE” is a short form for “do you love me”. People buy DOVE chocolates as a gift to express love.

5. Make it a ceremony

Disneyland’s parade is a typical ceremony. When the parade starts, hundreds of thousands kids and their families stand on each side of the parade path and eagerly wait for the famous cartoon characters they like. Disney use this kind of ceremony to encourage children to play/purchase with those mysterious characters.  Their merchandise sales skyrocketed.

6. Simplicity

When Xiaomi first launched its Mi phones, nobody knew anything about the smart phone besides its “MI” logo. However, after you switch on the phone and explore many advanced features, you want to know how much it cost. The phone is very affordable. Bingo, people want the phone badly. Xiaomi sold over 61 million phones and doubled its revenue to $12 billion US dollars in 2014.

How Marketing and Sales can work together?

I attended the recent Tech Marketing and Sales Think Tank roundtable discussion organized by ITAC ( Information Technology Association of Canada) and SMA.

The topic was “Sales vs. Marketing: closing the great divide”. One of the most often asked questions to me is how marketing and sales can work together. I heard a great analogy during the discussion - “farmer’s field”. “Marketing plants the seed, and cares for the plants while they are growing. Sales conducts the harvest.  Sales must save some of the harvest to generate seeds for the next crop. Without Marketing, Sales cannot harvest.  Without Sales, Marketing cannot plant.”

Marketing and Sales are different because Marketing, in most cases is one to many, whereas sales are normally one to one. However, with the new technology and changing customer behaviour, Marketing’s role has evolved. Today, marketing not only needs to continue to utilize one to many approach for brand awareness and thought leadership as corporate marketing, but also has to take responsibility for generating leads, so-called field marketing. At the field level, human to human marketing has become a trend for 2015 and beyond. In the Human Era, a business will thrive by individualizing an audience and building authentic connections.

But how can marketing provide individualized content and meaningful intelligence and at the same time enable sales? This comes with sales and marketing cooperation. Unfortunately, in the real business world, the co-operation is very challenging. Sales focus on closing deals and work diligently to meet their sales target. Marketing, on the other hand, has segmented into different functional groups such as corporate communication, digital and event marketing, each has different goals and KPIs. Both organizations have high expectations of the other, but very limited time and patience to understand the other party, let alone affect co-operation.

Marketing considers sales as the go-to resource for customers. Marketing wants to collect information such as customer buying behaviour at the different stages of the buyer’s journey and decision-making criteria as much as possible to direct marketing strategies through sales co-operation. But often times, the response rate is low as Sales is very protective of their customer base, worrying that marketing may take away some of their control over sales. Sales is also demanding that Marketing provide as much competitive information and industry intelligence to better equip them.

Here are some tips to improve Marketing and Sales cooperative strategies that work:

• Constant communications to close the misconception and build mutual understanding.
• Involve both Marketing and Sales in the planning and budgeting processes and find out common goals.
• Redefine sales compensation plans to encourage Sales to provide customer insights and maintain a good relationship with existing customer base.
• Include Marketing in the sales pipeline and build compensation/bonus plans accordingly.