The Side Note

With a title like “Thank God for the Recession: 5 Trends That Will Reshape Marketing,” how could this post not have caught my eye? And it’s a good thing it did, because Freddie Laker’s article helped me see the recession in a different light.

Laker says that the recession “might be the best thing that has happened to our industry in decades,” because it’s caused us to innovate, reinvent ourselves, think more strategically and bring a level of sophistication and maturity to our work and industry. I never thought about it this way – I’ve been so focused on marketing budgets getting cut – but I believe he’s right.

The five trends (a condensed version) Laker says are reshaping the face of marketing are:

• Brand as an enabler – We’re moving away from shortsighted, highly sales-driven marketing campaigns in favor of long-term brand platforms that use evergreen content to add value to your day.

• Distributed content – Modern digital marketers have recognized that in terms of the consumer, the center is everywhere. As a result, digital content is now designed to be syndicated, reskinned and reformatted while still remaining relevant.

• Customer service as marketing – While a great product or service backed up with great customer support or service remains your biggest asset in achieving success, never before has the vehicle of customer service become one of your best methods for connecting with consumers in a social-media-driven Web.

• Next-generation listening and targeting – As an industry we have moved beyond basic web and campaign analytics. Marketing firms are now able to monitor the entire customer life cycle with significantly more accuracy, and then track the correlation between traditional, digital and commerce channels and customer conversion.

• Meaningful metrics – Deep analytics and tracking are enabling meaningful insight. As a result, in its ongoing path to full maturity, digital marketing is finally adopting meaningful metrics that we can equate back to real business value. Now marketers are moving beyond digital-campaign measurement standards such as traffic and are instead mapping key performance indicators back to metrics and ultimately the conversation funnel, which includes the different levels of engagement – awareness, consideration, purchase intent, purchase and loyalty.

While slashed marketing budgets may still keep me up at night, I’m eased a little by the thought that our industry is continuing to growing, learn and produce innovative work. I guess every cloud has a silver lining.