It's about relationships stupid

The "Bad" - marketing to companies not humans

I just read an awesome post by Dr. Flint McLaughlin of MarketingExperiments.com.  The post called "The Prospect's Prostest" lays out an issue that is endemic in the marketing world...treating prospects like inanimate objects/companies instead of as humans.  In Flint's words, "I am not a target; I am a person: Don’t market to me, communicate with me."  The bottom line is that we need to scrap all the marketing fluff and communicate with honesty and integrity in order to develop a relationship of trust with the customer.  (take note all ad agencies and PR firms)

Comments

[Robert Moreau]

Excellent post.

In the business to business environment you find that to truly market from a relationship perspective, you must understand and be able to track behavior. It all starts by understanding your customers buying process, then moving onto to evaluating their behavior. If you are not able to track your customers online behavior (at the contact level) you should consider adding this function in 2008.

By using that as your cornerstone many marketers will find that your content and methods of communications will be better targeted and results will be improved.

The CMO council recently released their 2008 marketing outlook (for those of you that have not gotten your hands on it, I strongly encourage you to do so) and it stated that in 2007 marketing improved the accountability of their organization, and by using individual customer analytics were better able to target their initiatives leading to more effective results. This speaks directly to your point Todd.

Some additional findings included:

-Nearly 20% of marketers do not track their marketing dollars
-34% said they were planning to introduce a formal ROI tracking system
-45% of marketers expect to change thieir agency (top areas of change include web design and development, direct marketing, advertising and public relations)
-Top areas of marketing dollar allocation included strategy and branding, events and tradeshows, operations, direct marketing, sales support and online marketing)

If anyone would like a copy of the report, please feel free and contact me. Have a great January!