Skip to content

March 17, 2012

1

Have you ever wondered why marketing professionals start blogging ?

by Tom De Baere

Have you ever wondered why professionals start blogging ? Well, me too, until recently.

Somehow on blogs, bloggers need to have their first post, and this happens to be my first post. Some start immediately with providing their thoughts on a topic an post it straight away, which is just fine. Now, I went through a different process.

Blogs where not new to me, and I had used them to find information before, but I never really quite understood why people actually would spend time on doing research, and put their thoughts in text, videos, podcast or photos on-line. And then start tweeting, put status updates in LinkedIn, Facebook or Google+, and have conversations with people who react to their blog posts. And this on top of their already busy lives.

For me the “switch” was last summer when I was on holiday in Italy. I read books when I am on holiday, so I started reading a book on social media which started confirming to me that I was doing marketing totally wrong: 

  • I knew that I had to focus on the needs of the customer, their pains, but somehow I consistently doubted if my understanding of marketing was effective.
  • I knew how to spend spend thousands of euros on great looking advertising, massive trade-show booths and great looking customer cases and other marketing collateral.
  • I knew how to run webinars, push out press releases, and do mailings to customers and prospects.

Well, let me rephrase that : I thought I knew.

So somehow it did not feel right. After that first book, I read other great books that I think every marketer should read:

If you want to understand how to react to the following changes in our marketing world, then these books are a ‘must read’ for everyone who is serious about marketing :

  • the overload of advertisements that we get through various communication channels, and why advertising is becoming less effective
  • the explosion of social media and its effect on your sales, and how you need to work with these new social media
  • the increasing number of mobile devices that people start using more and more, and why you need to change your marketing to fit the mobile world
  • how to remain competitive in general by moving into this new digital world, because your competitors will also make this shift.

 

What did these books learn me ?

These books made me realize that in this fast changing digitally driven world, end-users and professional buyers have become more powerful, knowledgeable and have a louder voice than ever. It made me realize that the way people buy investment goods, property, consumer goods, ….whatever you can think of, have dramatically changed and that we as marketers need to adapt our strategy and tactics in order to survive as a company.

Maybe I am late realizing this, but when I talk to people in marketing, many still are not aware of this new world. They are still in the old world where classic marketing rules.

 

So why did I started blogging?

The reasons are simple:

  • Share my current experiences and learn more : after 15 years in sales & marketing, I might have some experience you can benefit from, but maybe I have nothing new for you. Fair enough. But maybe some of you out on the internet put a comment on my posts, which sparks new ideas that improves our mutual knowledge and experience.
  • Share my journey : now that I started to understand that marketers need to change in this digitally connected world, I would like to share my journey with you. Implementing some of the ideas I found in these books, but also the blogs and tweeters I got to know later, and share with you how I have implemented all these great ideas. Sharing my journey, and hopefully get some feedback from visitors, will make my journey better, and as such will make it better for the company I am working for.
  • Develop my Personal Brand : I would be lying that this is not part of this blog. For many years I have been on LinkedIn, occasionally used Facebook, and only recently I started with Twitter, to learn but also to develop my personal brand. I see this blog as a perfect way to expand my personal brand to its full extend.
  • Develop a following : as it seems, it takes time to get a following, and it is hard to keep it up. But silently I am hoping that I will succeed and that my thoughts will help someone, somewhere, sometime. Because that’s the whole philosophy of what I am trying to preach on this blog.

As with many people I know with a job in marketing, I am passionate about marketing. I hate to see bad marketing, or marketing that does not reach its goals. That’s why this blog will also feature both strategy, tactics as well as my own day-to-day experiences on what I believe is good marketing ;-).

Did you also make this “switch” ? Thanks for reading and please share your comments with me.

Best regards,

Tom De Baere

Read more from Marketing Strategy
, ,