The Death of Traditional Marketing
Why leading technology companies are rethinking marketing from scratch and you should too.
You will find this quite strange. Last week I started running marketing at Amplitude. Not the most obvious next step after joining them as a product manager.
Here’s why it happened.
A. Marketing as we have known it is on its LAST legs
Hey, it’s not just me saying it. HBR says it. Forbes says it. Gartner sees it but doesn’t say it yet. There’s a reason why the average tenure of a traditional marketing leader at most companies is now ~1yr and dropping. The old tried and tested strategies don’t work anymore.
Most people understand the problem. In fact let’s make a list of all the digital marketing things that you and I hate as *consumers*, shall we?
- Spammy email
- Advertisements that are not informative or entertaining
- Clickbait (no, this article isn’t)
- Being retargeted all over the internet
- Spammy popups
- PR approved quotes and “speaking points”
- Generally being told what to think and what to buy
We would be hard pressed to find people who wouldn’t agree that the world would be a better place without what digital marketing stands for today.
If the problem is so well understood, why hasn’t it been solved? Here’s my hypothesis. Most CMOs don’t know what to replace their old tools with. They are in panic mode and hire agencies to run “influencer marketing”. Most agencies don’t know what to do either so the result turns out to just be more advertising thinly veiled as social media.
To the end consumer, traditional marketing is antiquated, irrelevant and untrustworthy. Welcome to the death spiral of your company’s message.
This is a hard problem to solve. Transforming a core business function in your company doesn’t happen without great thought and conviction, as we discovered.
There is a clear impetus for change, though. Around the corner, there are looming regulatory pressures and emerging movements that threaten to change this landscape. Tightening privacy regulations and standards like the GDPR will force our industry to get it’s act together on how we target and communicate. The 10-yr-old-but-still-new growth-hacking movement has started revitalizing technology marketing with its focus on impact and aligning to customer value.
What do you do next? Read part B.
B. There’s a massive skill gap in marketing with ROI
Just using the word “Growth” is not going to transform marketing in your company. Talking about customer “Life Time Value” is not going to do it either.
Growth and LTV are not just metrics, they are completely different ways of hiring and organizing your business for success.
When I talk about ROI, people often say yes, we use data. Marketing already went through a data revolution over 2 decades ago. Companies like Google Analytics and Omniture (now Adobe Analytics) grew into billion dollar businesses on the back of increasing demand from CMOs for ways to measure advertising performance and user acquisition metrics.
The main problem is that they treated marketing as a siloed function in an organization that would optimize for traffic, not end user product adoption. They trained an entire generation of marketers to measure CTRs, page views and app downloads. They didn’t help marketers ask the question: what’s the real ROI that marketing needs to drive for this business right now?
As a result, there is a massive skill and knowledge gap in the marketing industry when it comes to quantitative understanding of customer behavior in products and what value they get out of it after signing up.
How do I know this? Every growth marketer who buys our product analytics platform uses it to understand customer behavior, product adoption and the long term ROI of their marketing investments in terms of realized revenue from happy customers. We have some of the largest and most forward thinking digital media, retail and b2b software companies in the world turning to us to measure and optimize their marketing strategy. At first, this was a surprise to us since we were primarily working with product teams. Now, it’s a clear trend.
Which leads me to part C.
C. PRODUCT is the new Marketing
For the new age customer, your product *is* your brand. The product experience you show them matters more than the things you tell them. The only service that matters to your customer is the person you can help them become and the life you can help them achieve.
On the flip side, everything that the consumer sees and touches is viewed as an extension of the company’s product — whether that’s a tweet, a billboard or a youtube video someone posted that no one knew about. You might be working in siloes but your customer doesn’t know and doesn’t care.
So what does the future of marketing look like? What does the modern marketer need to do to be successful?
Here are the five things that I see the best marketing teams in tech doing today and that my team at Amplitude is emulating.
#1 Get Out of the Way
Show don’t tell. Get out of the way of your customer trying to figure out whether they want your product. Get out of the way of helpful content that can guide a customer. Be obsessed with removing any friction between a potential customer and them getting a feel for your product’s experience and value. From Spotify to Dropbox — the fastest growing companies have honed their strategy to get you to start using the product as soon as possible.
#2 Be an Expert
Your job as a marketer now is to become the leading expert on your customer’s life, their aspirations and exactly how they are going to use your product for a better life. If product managers are the voice of your existing customers, marketers need to become the voice of prospective customers. You are the voice of the target market. Airbnb is a great example of a company and perhaps a marketing team that seems to live and breathe this ideology.
#3 Always be Helping
No one wants to be sold to. Everyone would like some help right now please. The new role of the marketing function is to inspire, educate and help beyond all else. Stripe is a great example of a company emulating this today with a customer persona that hates “marketing” more than anyone else — engineers.
#4 Share Authentic Stories
Where do I even start. I think the kind of storytelling Apple did in 1984 doesn’t work with our generation anymore. There is a cultural identity that defines tomorrow’s customers it might just be this: #NOFILTER
So how do you market to us? Speak the truth. Share the facts. Communicate to your customers like they are your friends just looking to solve a problem. Amplify the voice of your existing, happy customers — let them tell their story again and again. Dave Gerhardt from Drift has been evangelizing this too.
#5 Grow a Product Mindset
There’s a new-ish framework product managers use to get their work done. They call it “Jobs To Be Done”. PMs prioritze jobs. They then work with design and engineering to prototype and experiment with solutions until they find success. Marketing needs this hypothesis driven, engineering-first approach today. Netflix does an incredible job of having their marketing teams collaborate with engineering to personalize their acquisition and onboarding experience. Consumers win, company wins.
Some PSAs before I sign off.
- The Amplitude blog is where we write about the craft of modern, data informed product management and growth marketing. It’s a labour of love.
- We are hiring a visionary growth marketer who wants to create the future playbook for b2b marketing. Could it be you?
- If you found this article thought provoking, please share, 👏, and follow👇
