Earlier this year, I gave a presentation at Search Insider Summit on the topic of marketing mash-ups. It was a whirlwind tour of how marketing started from a single discipline and, over the years, fragmented into a dizzying array of specialties and subspecialties.
It also offers a few ideas for how we can turn this fragmented landscape into a source of new cross-speciality creativity — and maybe, just maybe, unify marketing once again.
Someone just showed me that the video recording of that session is available online, so if you can stomach a frenetic amount of hand waving, you might enjoy this:
Scott,
You make some fabulous points here. As customers continue wanting unified brand experiences we as marketing keep fragmenting our marketing efforts. No wonder we are seen as more noise than relevance for customers. One point I do want to address though is that while our book Always Be Testing didn’t have huge overlap with content marketing, our book Waiting for Your Cat to Bark (2006) was a very clear overlap between content marketing and conversion marketing.
Indeed! I’ll offer my endorsement right here: every marketer should read Waiting for Your Cat to Bark. The new movement of focusing on “customer experience” is largely simply a reframing of persuasion architecture.
Many marketers mainly market marketing services to help other marketers market more. Sorry about that sentence. Given the bit of truth in that, don’t marketers naturally excel at creating interesting names for things- constantly reinvigorating the idea of that they do as the most right approach?
We are redoing our site at the moment and I thought it timely to consider introducing a new term, no a new discipline I’ve been developing- a mashup of traffic generation, lead gen, lead nuturing+retargeting, and retention marketing. The holy grail. Lifecycle marketing. Going beyond the closed loop to track referrals to the next generation of leads.
I’ve decided to spare the world another term. We do marketing. Thanks for helping me in the process Scott : )