Marketing As The Social Business Spark

The role of marketing in organizations has never been more critical.

But probably not for the reasons you think.

The obvious discussions are often centered around marketing as the new front line of engagement for organizations. Marketing is the part of the company best suited to leading the organizational charge around social marketing and all of the intersections of paid, earned, and owned media.

All of that can be true.

But the real impact of marketing’s role in the social evolution goes even deeper.

Today, thanks to the fluid and real-time nature of social, we invest a lot of time and energy in the things that will create an amazing impression and connection with our customers online. We build community engagement initiatives, we develop content content with the purpose of education and information, and hope that we can establish early relationships with prospects online so they'll come to like us, trust us and want to learn more about us.

If we're successful, we’ve just set a pretty incredible expectation.

An expectation that says that we as a company believe in an overall philosophy that goes beyond making customers a priority. A philosophy that invests in both the operational and cultural backbone of our organization, so we can deliver customer love all the time, no matter what department they touch.

We can’t quit at the margins, stop at the edges of a clever marketing campaign, count our leads or conversions, and believe that our jobs are done.

The continued ripple effect after that clever marketing is where the true shift is happening in business.

It creates massive implications for how we support customers long term, for how our employees work with each other and communicate. We need to adapt the way we work to accommodate the new expectations we’re setting for our customers.

That means that the inside of our business is changing as much as the outside.

It means that marketing is the catalyst for not just a change in the way we communicate and market our brands. But that marketing can be a catalyst for adapting both the operations and the culture of our companies to become more connected, more adaptable,and more able to keep pace with the ever-shifting needs and demands of today’s empowered customer.

Simply put, today’s marketers need to be social business professionals.

They need to represent a new philosophy and a more modern point of view about their role in not just social media, but the holistic, organizational direction that will align marketing with customer service with HR, IT, sales, partners…all across the board.

Today’s most promising marketers are ready to embrace the opportunity to not just revolutionize the way we look at a sales lead, or a content campaign, but who just might see their role as a spark that can ignite new ways of thinking and working altogether.

Marketers are in a unique and exciting position to be the ambassadors for a pretty incredible new era, and I don’t think that’s an overstatement. The demand for professionals that understand social business – not just social media – is accelerating, and more than anything, it’s exciting.

Do you see it that way too?

http://blog.marketo.com/blog/2013/04/marketing-as-the-social-business-spark.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+modernb2bmarketing+%28Marketo+B2B+Marketing+and+Sales+Blogs%29