Modern, measurable marketing. Sounds like a catchy tagline. But what is modern marketing? Great question. At Lake One we have a strong opinion about what modern marketing is and are often asked about it. Whether it's what exactly would you say you do?
Or more directly, what is modern marketing?
What is modern marketing?
We consider modern marketing any strategy that leverages a measurable, scalable approach to understanding audience/product alignment. What we mean by this, is that modern marketing is always striving to achieve two things.
First, to be accountable to the question of what did marketing deliver. Either in a financial return, or measurable learning about a market. Marketing today doesn't have to be black magic. We don't have to guess. With the democratization of complex analysis and machine learning, we're able to learn quickly what works and what doesn't work, whether we're online, offline, or on the go.
Second, marketing should seek to drive scale and efficiency.We're not looking for a one hit wonder. A great ad campaign. Yes, there is still a place for great branding and brand strategy, but modern marketing seeks to scale and create efficiency in the lessons we learn along the way. Ultimately, this is where you start to see the kind of hyper-growth emerging from the startup community.
Leveraging the metrics driven mentality and a desire to find avenues that can scale, modern marketing allows businesses to learn what works fast, and then ramp that up as sales and revenue follow.
A modern marketing framework
I wrote previously on modern marketing strategies every business should leverage. But that is in no way an exhaustive list. Modern marketing strategies and tactics are an expansive list but usually, fall into distinct buckets. These buckets also happen to be the way I think of my framework for building a marketing technology stack.
Planning
Too often planning how we want to plan consumes a lot of time. Modern marketing seeks efficiency in this stage by creating a framework and process quickly. As a result iterative, or sprint planning, borrowed from the software world, is often the modus operandi.
Awareness
Awareness strategies and tactics are very very focused. Rather than a spray and pray mentality so many advertising and old school PR strategies would take, modern marketing is hyper focused on audience/product understanding. Finding where pockets of opportunity exist and leveraging technology to reach and scale outreach to those pockets with relevant on point messages. This creates an awareness strategy that's less about brand development, and more about demand generation and feeding a conversion funnel.
Conversion
All campaigns and activities are thought of in path or funnel structure. From the first contact to the final point we want our audiences to take. Modern marketing focuses on conversion path building and optimization as the thread that ties the marketing machine together. Everything we do ties back to the success or failure of conversion funnels. Conversion funnels, customer journeys, campaigns, they all mean the same thing in the modern marketing world.
Sales/Nurture
Modern marketing makes sales and nurturing more relevant. Modern marketing looks to constantly be adapting response plans and adjusting the way sales interacts with suspects, prospects, and leads based on real-time feedback. Ultimately, this response, over time, increases sales success.
Analytics
Analytics and automation are the glue the hold a modern marketing machine together. Analytics provides the constant flow of insights and data during campaign planning, optimization, and ongoing iteration. Too often businesses will just throw up a website with an analytics tag and then never go any further, missing a trove of insights to improve their sales and marketing processes. Modern marketing asks a ton of questions, and analytics answers them.
Automation
Automation isn't intended to dehumanize marketing or business. Instead, it scales the human elements so that a business can reach more. From connecting applications to each other to kick off sequences of activities, to setting off communication events, automation makes the modern marketing world go round.
Final thoughts on modern marketing
Modern marketing might sound like a buzz word, and in some ways it is. But it's intended to drive a distinction between a time when marketing sciences were either unaccessible to small and medium size businesses, and most people thought of marketing as that department that just made sales brochures and got in the way a lot.
Today, marketing continues to evolve into a business partner function, often a core driver behind growth and growth decisions. The primary reason is the insights and scale that modern marketing affords.
If you're interested in learning more, give me a shout on Twitter or LinkedIn. I'd love to geek out on how modern marketing can make an impact for you.
