subject: The Cutting Edge Of Marketing [print this page] I remember when I was younger, a teenager, and all of the older girls, young ladies I knew, were holding marketing jobs. I couldn't quite understand what it was all about. Then I learned that the Marketing Department is one of the most creative departments of a company. And organisations that are built on marketing are bursting at the seems with cutting edge ideas. The thing about marketing is that it is always changing. It is not about one product or service, it is about positioning that product or service, framing it in a way that makes people want it, a way that speaks to millions of people but only sounds like it's speaking to one.
The mediums on which we market seem to change almost as often as the message. Print, TV, radio, outdoor, online, the list never seems to end. And the more advanced the medium, the more marketing channels it has. Satellite television has thousands of channels, and choosing to run an ad on one requires careful consideration because the results will be very different from choosing to run it on another.
The internet is the most advanced marketing medium. There are thousands of websites and hundreds of ways to communicate, which means that marketing agencies need to not only understand their client, their audience and their message but they need to understand the mediums, how they work, how people use them and which ones are best for the brand and the campaign.
Like marketing itself, the internet is always changing. What was cutting edge and commonly written about one year or month, might very well change the next. For instance Search Engine Optimisation was all of the online marketing rage not too long ago. Search engines were where people looked for answers and business referrals so to be at the top of the list for a keyword that reflected you seemed beneficial to most companies large and small, and it was, it still is. But as the algorithms continued to change, and online marketing experts found solutions around them, so too did online marketers in Indian and other parts of the world where labour is cheap. In the world of linkbuilding, for the most part, quality comes secondary to quantity, meaning a lot of people can do the job.
What's being highly discussed today is social media marketing. Its return on investment is more difficult to measure, but it represents a set of channels that hundreds of millions of consumers are using and therefore so too are the world's biggest and best brands. And if you want to appeal to the biggest and best brands, you're going to have to come up with innovative and brilliant marketing campaigns.
