Saturday, February 12, 2011

Taking Marketing Contribution Beyond Marketing Department

Most of the times, marketing is a separate department in the organizations. There is a ‘marketing team’ which handles all the aspects such branding, positioning, pricing etc. Well, it probably worked well in past when there were only handful ways of reaching out to users. However, with the new age of social media, don’t you think the definition of marketing has expanded to blogging, managing customer comments, reviews, creating and managing social media presence, analyzing results and all such things? Marketing has become a lot about conversation.

I believe that a lot of people in the company – outside the marketing department - can very well participate in this conversation with the users of your products and services.

How? Imagine this:
  • Your engineers writing a blog article about the latest technology which your company has mastered
  • Your support engineer providing responses to user queries on your online community and resolving issues – beyond email, phone or chat support
  • Your technical engineer creating a video on using a particular feature in your product and posting it on YouTube
  • Your sales teams posting interesting, informative and educative presentations on presentation sharing websites
  • Your content writer gathering inputs about a latest paradigm by participating in discussion forums
  • Your technical architect writing a post about a latest, cutting-edge technology and inviting comments from other tech-savvy people around

The list can just go on. So what’s happening here? Variety of people and not just the marketing team are contributing in creating an image, a brand about the company by utilizing their knowledge. Isn’t it great? What more can you expect when the best and experts are in action!


Well, I am convinced on this because I have tried this. Do you think it’s time for you to take a leap in this direction?

4 comments:

  1. Your post has come at the right time. This Thursday I will be presenting to my PM group about how they can help in marketing activity.

    My concept of marketing is very simple. It is a thin membrane between suspect/prospect and your company. Company sees outside world through this membrane and outside world sees the company through this membrane.

    What you project on this membrane will be seen by your suspect/prospect. Marketing is good at polishing and presenting it in right format but it can't create content that needs to be projected on this membrane. It's whole company's job and not just marketing.

    After all, marketing is all from conceptualization to commercialization.

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  2. @Mandar: Liked your way you have given the analogy of membrane and have elaborated this. Thanks for sharing your views. And yes, good luck with your presentation! :-)

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  3. Nice thought Mam, but what's for them who are in marketing team and doing all these activities on behalf of other colleagues :)

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  4. @Dipti: The marketing team is certainly the core team handling all the marketing activities for the company. This post describes how other departments can also contribute in the activity helping businesses enhance their brand image :)

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