Scenarios like this tend to attract a legion of false prophets, the kind who pay lip service to the revolution in slot machines and write unreadable 400-page books, filling in the gaps with concepts that could be explained in the space of a napkin.
Let’s get back to the point. The must-read book I’m referring to came out in 2014 and is called The Marketing Performance Blueprint . The author is Paul Roetzer, CEO of the PR agency 20/20, in Cleveland, USA.
What makes Roetzer’s book different from others is the email list uk that it was written by someone who is in the trenches, that is, serving corporate clients and delivering projects in the real world, dealing with real problems and opportunities.
The central concept of the book is what Roetzer calls the performance gap: the distance between what digital marketing is today and what it needs to be – ideally yesterday – to fulfill its mission. What mission? To support sales and accelerate the growth of your company.
Roetzer divides the performance gap into three parts: the talent gap, the strategy gap and the technology gap. The talent gap has already been discussed here on the Hook blog , and today I want to talk a little more about it.
The talent gap in digital marketing
We all know top-notch professionals. Sometimes we’ve even been lucky enough to work with some of them. When I talk about the talent gap in digital marketing, I'm not referring to a possible lack of good people in the market, but rather to the skills needed by a team to carry out a digital marketing project that goes beyond ready-made recipes along the lines of "channel + message + target audience = strategy".
That bets on responsible, planned and measurable experimentation to arrive at the ideal mix of actions that works for your company, product, client and market. That makes the greatest possible impact from every penny invested.
Unless you live under a rock, you must have already noticed that things have changed. And they have changed, summing up all the conceptual talk you hear out there, for a simple reason: thanks to technology, consumer behavior has changed. At least when it comes to marketing and sales, it is now the boss.
Reflect on your own behavior as a consumer and tell me if you buy today (i.e. research, compare, decide) the same way you did in the 80s and 90s. And imagine your children and grandchildren, how they buy today and how they will buy tomorrow.
If consumer behavior has changed, the way we think about and do digital marketing has to change along with it, and quickly. Roetzer says that “the job of every marketing professional, from the copywriter to the CMO, is to connect actions and results.”
Summarizing the points he describes in the book in light of my own experience as a (seasoned, but fallible, like everyone else) communications and marketing professional, I would say that the skills needed to start closing the talent gap are the following.
1. Strategy
Like any word that has been overused, at this point in the game, strategy can mean anything. So, let me be as clear and specific as possible: a professional with this skill is someone who is capable of creating Digital Marketing strategies based on the profile and expectations of the public, and not on what the company is interested in communicating.
In short, a strategy to serve the public, your public, in the best possible way, at each stage of the purchase cycle (which on this side of the counter we call the sales funnel). It helps you research, compare and decide on the best product or service option.