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Marketing Talent is What’s Missing
I just read Russ Page’s great post on entrepreneurs being marketers by the very nature of who they are. He references a post I wrote a month or two ago about everybody working in sales. Thanks, Russ. I’ve been stirring over this issue hard lately. Here’s my take…
I have noticed lately that the one component missing in so many start ups and companies in general is marketing. To be more precise, the right marketer and the right budget for that marketer. Its the one big black hole that is hurting so many organizations. Podango has a great marketing consultant but she’s not with us full time. We recognize that we need to give this area more attention. 10Speed Media suffered because we didn’t have a full time marketing person that was simply dedicated to building brand, SEO, lead generation and even basic PR. With the right resources (and given more time and a real investment) 10Speed Media would be way farther down the road than it now is. I have a friend who runs a company that’s doing very well. I think his company could be driving way more sales if they were doing some simple Web marketing things that they don’t appear to be doing. Even if they wanted to do it - it doesn’t appear that they have the right staff in place to implement it.
Most start ups are missing the marketing person. Sure they have computer programmers and a biz dev or sales guy and maybe even a part time customer support rep or accountant but no marketing person. I find that in most start ups the CEO or the sales guy try to take on the marketing role but they simply do not have enough bandwidth, budget or experience in marketing to give it the attention it needs. Thus, it gets pushed to the side. Its really a simple formula: marketing = money that we don’t have so we’ll “bootstrap” it, which means we’ll get to it when we can, which means it will never happen. Remember sales and marketing are two very different activities - treat them as such.Â
I believe that marketing is the biggest hole in our local talent pool. We need more good marketing people in Utah. Beyond that, the marketing people we have need to get up to speed on PR 2.0, SEO, podcasting, blogging, affiliate programs and even pay per click marketing. In the last year I’ve met with tons of marketing people. I always ask them if they are using PR Web to increase their page rank or if they’ve implemented a pay per click program or if they’re up on proper home page layout and techniques for natural search optimization or if they’re running a simple affiliate program. Usually the answer to these questions is blank stares. That’s a real problem.
Folks, the Internet is not where marketing is going - the Internet is where marketing is! If you are not there now then you are way behind the curve. It is so efficient. It is so effective. 10Speed Media did a video for the Winter at Westminster program that has had more than 4,000 highly targeted views on YouTube in just five short months. Because of the long tail, that video will promote W@W and Westminster College for years to come at no additional marketing cost to the school. What an incredible marketing tool!
My friend Sarah West who runs the Winter at Westminster program has become an expert in Internet marketing. When she started the program she asked me to help her figure out a Web strategy, which I did, but she executed it and she has been an amazing advocate at Westminster for Web-based marketing. Its a shift that is greatly influencing the organization and its one that is helping drive new students not just to the Winter at Westminster program but to Westminster in general.Â
Several days ago I got an unexpected call from a former boss who had all sorts of questions about Web-based marketing. To his credit he is trying to get a strategy in place to take advantage of the single greatest gift ever given to marketers and business in general: The Internet.
Are you?
not to be self promoting, but you reminded me of another post
How PR beat PPC by 56.3 percent
Left by Russell Page on 10/19/2006http://www.russpage.net/how-pr-beat-ppc-by-563-percent/
AMEN Chris. We know a company that let go of all of their marketing staff. BAD idea. Another bad idea is thinking that your programmers can do your internet marketing. Happens all the time, even in big established companies. There really needs to be more education about internet marketing.
Don’t just add a marketing title to someone in your organization. Hire a contractor (I write SEO press releases). It will cost you but you can do so much more for your buck than in print plus you can measure results.
If you’re short on cash, I’d start by doing search optimized press releases (which you always post in HTML with links on your site), adding title tags/descriptions/and possibly keywords to every page on your web site, and starting a blog. I’m sure we’re preaching to the choir on your site.
Great posts lately! I’m enjoying them.
Janet
Left by Janet on 10/19/2006Russ, that was a awesome post. Thanks for the lnk. Janet, thank you as well. I hope people listen to you when you talk PR Web. Its a great tool.
Left by ctknud on 10/19/2006The web and technology is industry is experiencing exciting growth/maturity with the enthusiasm about “Web 2.0″ apps. This movement seems to be led by the tech savvy, which too often doesn’t seem to apply to marketing personnel. Obviously this is generalizing, which applied globally is not acceptable, but in my “limited†experience this tends to be true and as a result we experience what is mentioned here…a lack of trained marketing personnel in new start-ups. Hopefully this trend will auto-correct itself as “Web 2.0†gains extended adoption outside of the tech realm and other specialties begin to embrace today’s internet marketing strategies.
Left by Thomas Bowcut on 10/20/2006As a technologist this topic has been a hard thing for me to swallow. I think that most techies have the attitude that “We are making this really cool technology that is revolutionary! Nobody else is doing it like this. It will sell itself.”
Like you have pointed out… That ain’t the case. I think you agree that that is one of the lessons we learned with Geartrade. We had good technology, but were unable to get the story out.
Since then I have worked with several great marketing people. It is amazing what the right marketing can do. And I think what you find is that most of what needs to be done isn’t very difficult, it just needs to have the proper priority placed on it and it just needs to be done.
Left by Nate Jensen on 10/20/2006[...] Bottom line: Who’s on the management team and what are their qualifications? Who’s running marketing? How much money do you need to get to break even? Who wants your stuff and why? When will you be out of beta? How do you make money? [...]
Left by ChrisKnudsen.biz » A Few Questions For TagJungle on 10/25/2006