A client introduced his intern who said, “I’m looking for an
inbound marketing job.”
Fortunately I’m familiar with the term. Most small
businesses are not.
According to the census, 78% of the firms in the USA don’t have
employees. Of those remaining, 36% have fewer than 100 employees. In other
words 99% of the firms in the country have fewer than 100 employees. So this
young man is going to send out resumes saying he is looking for a job 99% of
the firms in the country don’t have.
Our universities continue to teach as if all marketing jobs
are in Enterprise
level organizations. And they continue to mislead young men and women that are
really pretty talented by stressing the possibilities of the new without
recognizing the power and the crossovers from the old.
They call print and broadcast “Traditional Media” Direct Marketing
in all forms is looked down on. According to the youngsters I’m talking to very
little real instruction is devoted to those areas in class.
Anything that has to do with the internet is considered “New
Media” Their pursuit of the “bright shiny new technological toy” beggars the
imagination. Young men and women can cite voluminous statistics about how many
followers and connections are involved in the “social media” but they can’t
tell you what really works even though that is the promised differential
between “Traditional Media” and “New Media”
Twenty years ago the argument was about Business to Consumer
versus Business to Business (B to C versus B to 
Now we have “Inbound Marketing” versus “Interruption
Marketing”
Seth Godin introduced the term “Permission Marketing.”
I’ve heard and seen the term “Content Marketing” used.
The list goes on as marketing firms try to sound like
specialists … and get caught in their own word webs as the new technologies
morph around them. You ask where to find the milk when you walk into the store… even if you drink something that never saw a cow
It is all Marketing. The job hasn’t changed. You
have to be capable of two things:
1. The
ability to analyze the available data
2. The
ability to empathize with a target audience to create ways to persuade,
convince and close the sale.
The internet has changed the tools available but it has not
changed the job. We need to understand more ways to reach our objectives. We
need to understand how to measure your success regardless of the marketing
strategies and tactics employed.
But most of all we need to stop inventing names for the
various and sundry ways to get the Marketing job done.
Pardon the rant. Have you got a name you’d like to throw
against the wall to see if I sticks? Fire off a comment.
Jerry gets his dander up when misinformation is rampant. At other times he’s a pussycat…if you like lions. That’s part of why you need to visit www.JerryFletcher.com