I've been talking to a ton of digital marketers as the new year has begun, new initiatives have launched, and new budgets approved. Here's what I'm hearing.
"I wonder if this is the year someone will give a sh** about data."
"Everyone here is looking over their shoulders to see if they're going to get shot, and yet I spent all morning editing copy for a sales brochure no one uses. We've got a warehouse full of last year's."
My favorite, from an agency friend: "If the CEO knew what we knew about how his own company is performing, he'd sh** his pants."
(There's something about the "s" word and digital marketing, apparently.)
The fact is digital marketing people simply have access to a lot of data about a company's performance, not just in marketing but across a wider spectrum of business, from customer service to product development. Data originates from every corner of marketing -- from web sites to social media efforts to simple ol' email. When you start digging into that data, well, sometimes you can't help yourself -- you keep digging. And you keep finding nuggets of insights. So you dig some more. More nuggets. Then you sit back and think to yourself, "Who else knows this stuff? Who should? Who cares?"
The marketplace is no longer defined by the movement of atoms. That was the 20th Century. We live in a world defined by the movement of bits and bytes. Anyone in the world of process engineering or finance -- which I am not -- knows that it's the bits and bytes that tell you how to move the atoms around. Marketing seems to be that final frontier to undergo the full transformation, and I fully understand why it's taken so long: marketing is the most human (emotional?) side of business. There's always been this fear that the digital people are trying to replace the humans with computers and gadgets and whizbang web sites.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. I believe that high-performing organizations now have enough miles on their digital tires to recognize that delving into the data establishes insights that simply allow us to be better humans than we were before. How can we please people better? How can we build better products? How can we cut waste? How can we be better stewards of budgets and limited resources? How can we collaborate? How can we transcend "marketing speak" and have actual conversations with each other?
