3 essential tips for modern marketeers

Modern marketeers have extraordinary opportunities with tools and abilities today that weren’t even available 5 years ago (see my thoughts on data-driven marketing and artificial intelligence). 
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They’ve got empowered and very dynamic consumers that create petabytes of useful data, and in result, are making the process, technologies and the nature of marketing change at the speed of light into a real, hard-core, and (soon to be) exact data science.
Then there’s the growing widespread adoption of mobile and social technologies that create demand-side economies of scale that make consumers ever more demanding at every step of their buying journey - today they expect from brands two-way, relevant, and consistent conversations and experiences. 

Old school marketeers were merely communicating about product value. Today marketing is more about relationship management, based on all the data you have harvested on your customer - as for each new channel or device a consumer adopts, it creates more data, which in turn becomes another opportunity to get new insights on your customer. 

As increasingly larger sets of disconnected data gets harvested, your ability to connect the data dots as a modern marketeer becomes obvious, here are the three areas I believe should be part of any marketing strategy in 2017. 

be relevant and engaging

​I have said that a million times before: your content must ring true and have relevant value to your target customer. Long gone are the days when you would expect people to simply accept your message at its face value and take the call to action you request from them.  Today consumers always start by an online search and browse social media for answers (observe your kids really closely) and latch immediately on brands that will bring them both relevant and simple solutions. This also means that in terms of real engagement, without a brand evangelist or influencer that is living and breathing directly from your target consumer cohort, your chances of success today are greatly impaired - as I said before you need to be relevant and engaging, modern marketing is more a business of relationship building and you will need to build a true community around your products and services. Otherwise you will be ignored as part of the constant digital noise of a connected world.

target social groups instead of life stages

The political industry has understood this over the past 3 election cycles: life stage segmentation is obsolete today. As consumers today strongly associate with their social groups, targets become non-linear: instead you will have to increasingly focus your attention to clusters that are drawn to social causes, alternative lifestyles, and social media influencers. 

its all about mobile marketing

It’s always been interesting for me to see so many businesses, large and small, that in 2017 still have not optimized their websites for mobile view. You should build for mobile first, any other (larger) screen size should be an afterthought. 

Once you have established that, now is the time for you to be creative. Think about integrating yourself inside popular apps content as ethical bribes such as rewards and discounts, drive traffic to your own mobile properties. 
Modern Marketing doesn’t have to be hard. By targeting social groups instead of life stages, focusing on mobile and being relevant and engaging, you’ll definitely soon seen more return for any marketing budget you’re willing to spend.

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My name's phil mora and I blog about the things I love: fitness, hacking work, tech and anything holistic. 
Thinker, doer, designer, coder, leader.
Head of Product at Sikka Software.
 Here's my contact info.

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