Troy White has a good post about the wide range of tools that are now available to marketers.
When I was a marketing trainee some eight or so years ago, I was taught that marcomms tools were either above or below the line. And there was a fairly small number of different tools available to employ. Being a marketer you had to grasp how to use these communications outlets to achieve your objectives.
I’ve blogged before about how marketers need to understand the digital medium to be able to do their job effectively. Troy makes a strong point about tools – there are many more tools now available, but the results we achieve as marketers depends not on how many tools we have, but how we use them, and more importantly how we use them in combination.
I’d be really interested to know how marketing is taught on trainee programmes now. The old way of teaching the basics of marketing strategy, and then detailed teaching on a small number of marcomms channels can’t work anymore.
The only way to know and understand the plethora of channels available to marketers is to have a go at using them, and then try to think about how they could be used to meet a particular set of objectives. The skill will be to select the most appropriate marketing tools for a campaign, and then know how to use them most effectively.