What to Do About All the Changes in Marketing

Wander through LinkedIn with me and together we’ll trip over pundity post after post talking about the Big Shifts in marketing, writing, communications. (Full disclosure: I’ve written some of them.) You might see:

• Traditional SEO is dying.
• Our businesses are getting less love (and therefore less traffic) from Google.
• AI is upending <waves arms vaguely at sky> everything.

Are the Big Shifts actually happening? Yes. (Although I just noticed the acronym for Big Shifts is BS—because have you noticed there seems to be a lot of hysteria from some in the eVEry*THiNG iS ChaNG*inG camp?) Deeeeeep breath from the diaphragm. If SEO is changing… If Google is shifting… If AI is that overly enthusiastic golden retriever dropping tennis balls at our feet, relentlessly determined to get us to THROW THE BALL THROW IT THROW IT THROW IT… What does that actually mean for us? Here’s how I think of it… It means Brand suddenly has slipped back into the room, after the Performance Team banned it for years from competing. It means Your FROM Line matters more than your SUBJECT Line. This is the metaphor for Marketing in 2024. Our direct relationships with people (customers, prospects) matter more than ever. It means: How do we sign our work? Our warm, relatable human voices need to articulate who we are clearly and consistently. Not shouting like the eVEry*THiNG iS ChaNG*inG Campers. But resonant enough to be heard.) (We talked about this a few weeks ago in this newsletter; Jay Acunzo and I unpack it further in our delightful conversation here.) It means we need to inspire people to seek us out vs. hope/pray/pay Google to surface us for them. It means If people increasingly use gen AI platforms to surface answers instead of Google, we should be sure that we are showing up consistently, frequently, and with actual insights. My friend Chris Penn has been saying that for months now. * * * To be honest, I look at the road map for what succeeds in Marketing for the near term and think that it’s a deepening of what I have been preaching all along. Focus on building trust, affinity. Focus on building a platform that gives you a relationship with your audience through work you love. Create something that you’re proud of and that your audience values. Pro tip: Something you own. An email newsletter would be my recommendation, because email is the only thing that isn’t subject to the vagaries and whims of the petulant toddler of an algorithm that is the social web in 2024. But most of all… Focus on doing what brings your joy. * * * Marketing is FUN, remember? We are creative souls. Missing in the conversation on LinkedIn and elsewhere is this: We don’t spend enough time talking about the sheer delight of creating things we love—things that we co-create with our brains, our hearts, our hands, our whole selves. You can tell, can’t you, when people create with their brains and hearts and hands? Can’t you tell when they’ve warmed their work with their own breath? Can’t you feel when they clearly love their work, when they leave handprints and hoofprints and huff marks in a way to signal who they are and how the work gets done? I can. * * * Here are three examples I saw this week. I’ll share them, and then show how the sound of hoofprints IS clear as a bell. 1. A New B2B Manifesto, from Velocity Partners

“If a CMO went to sleep in 1994 and woke up today, she’d think she was on another planet. “And she’d be right. “What used to be the coloring-in department is now a joyless pipeline sweatshop…. “The Senior VP of Ideation has been replaced by three MarTech geeks and an LLM.”

The sound of hoofprints: Velocity crafts a point of view by world-building. “World-building” is a literary device that refers to how authors create a fictional world in which their story takes place. Here, Velocity beautifully drops us into the “new world” of B2B marketing:

• “Joyless pipeline sweatshop”—so visceral, so real. You can almost fill your lungs with the hot, stuffy air and hear the hiss of machine pistons firing.
• “3 MarTech geeks and an LLM” echoes the opening to a joke, as in “3 geeks and an LLM walk into a bar,” which only reinforces how much the joke is on that Rip Van Winkle of a CMO, walking into this new world.

2. Order confirmation email, from Routine Wellness (via TA reader Karen Kilgarin)

“Karen, you did it! “It was just a Routine day at our office when all of a sudden, Ruby jumped on top of her desk and looked at the entire office in disbelief. ‘We’ve officially made it,’ she said—’Karen just ordered from us!’ “The entire office erupted in applause, and Sam did a plank for three minutes to work off some of the adrenaline she was feeling. Don’t Stop Believing started blaring from the speakers as we popped a bottle of champagne and raised a glass to you.”

The sound of hoofprints: Back in 1998, CD Baby founder Derek Sivers pioneered the idea of an over-the-top confirmation email. He tells the story here. Derek’s self-described goofy 20-minute email inspired thousands of companies to rethink their own transactional emails. But many more have not—even a little bit—which is why approaches like this STILL stand out. (Even the Big Shift people begrudgingly nod along.) As Derek writes: “When you’re thinking of how to make your business bigger, it’s tempting to try to think all the big thoughts and come up with world-changing massive-action plans. “But please know that it’s often the tiny details that really thrill people enough to make them tell all their friends about you.” Tiny details that thrill. We talk about this in the best detail in Everybody Writes 2. 3. Email newsletter, from David BerkowitzDavid writes about the cramped quarters on an overnight train trip he and his daughter took.

“The trains had what we wound up calling ‘coffins’—there’s less space, and there are no windows, so it’s like traveling the country in an MRI machine.”

Sounds of hoofprints: Yeah, but what’s it FEEL like? Not just “cramped.” Not “small.” Put your reader right into that narrow bed. Let them feel the panic rising in their gut. Have you ever been in coffin? I haven’t. But an MRI machine? Relatable. BTW—I asked David if his metaphor was his or suggested by the golden retriever of AI. His, he said. He also said he “workshopped” it a bit between telling others about the experience before writing about it: “A story that resonates well when I tell it will probably make it into the writing,” he said. Do you enjoy hearing this little bit of a writer’s creative process as much as I do?