Marketing Trends – it’s all about people

I was laughing to myself the entire time I was at the Inbound Conference; we all wanted to learn about the latest trends. Marketing is all about people. Oh yes, that was an earth shattering revelation. I’ve been in the business world over 25 years and it is fascinating to me to see how some things never change. Business and marketing is really about people. It always has been. With all this new technology that is easy for anyone to use, people get too wrapped up in the technology and they forget that they are selling to people. Having the best markeketing in the world won’t help you at all if you don’t have good people working for you who can follow through at what your marketing promises.

Marketing should:

1. Make someone’s day a little bit better.

Gone are the days of push marketing. No one likes to be interrupted by ads, think of everyone who uses TIVO to fast forward through commercials. Think of all the magazines shutting down because their ad revenues are way down. When is the last time you bought something because of a print ad or a radio ad?

If an ad makes you laugh or makes you feel good, aren’t you more inclined to buy from that company?

2. Be interesting to your target audience.

People have the attention spans of gnats these days. If you can’t capture their interest in the first 3 seconds, you’ve lost them. They have moved on to something else.

3. Move beyond social media.

To get inspired about this, look at the story of how Charmin donated 70,000 rolls of toilet paper to the Detroit Fire Department, after they heard that the firemen had to use their own money to buy toilet paper!

Here’s the story:

Charmin helps out Detroit Firemen.

4. Use data to find out what HUMANS care about.

I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at Google Analytics, but basically you can report on anything you want. That doesn’t mean you should. I will talk more about data in a later post, but for now keep in mind, what can the data tell you about PEOPLE.

On the other side, to hire and keep good people, you should:

1. Obsess on the basics.

This quote is from Darmesh Shah, co-founder of Hubspot.

2. Hire people with a positive, can-do attitude.

You can’t teach attitude, you can teach business skills.

3. Perform acts of kindness.

What? You may be saying, kindness and business are often thought of as opposites. After all, isn’t business about “killing” the competition. Oops, I had a mental lapse back to my business school days. I say, rather than “kill” why not try kindness. Most people, your staff included, respond better to positive incentives, rather than threats.

4. Spark imagination.

How else do you think innovation happens? This isn’t just for technology companies who are on the cutting edge, but any business. I maintain that any business, any industry can benefit from employees having imagination and vision to change something.

I’d love to hear what marketing trends you are seeing.

Happy photo is courtesy of LJW Devon’s Flickr Photostream, under Creative Commons Licensing.