Essay on
The New Rules of Marketing and PR
by David Meerman Scott
I was interested in getting to know what new David Meerman Scott brings in the area of marketing as it is one of my core interests. David provides a guide to understanding “the new rules of marketing and PR”, which are centered around the concept of creating valuable content and engaging with customers on various digital platforms.
One of the core messages of the book is the importance of understanding our audience and creating content that resonates with them. David emphasizes the need for businesses to move away from traditional advertising methods and focus on creating valuable content that educates, informs, and entertains their target audience. I would like to pause here and comment on this. I find this highly important in today's world. The old traditional advertising doesn't work for a while now with the information overload we face. We need to give our potential customers value in the content we create. If we help them solve an issue they actually face, give them information that is personally relevant for them or relate to them in terms of humor, they have a reason to follow us, remember us and eventually buy from us.
Another key idea in the book is the power of social media and digital marketing. Scott highlights the importance of using social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to engage with customers and build relationships with them. Another thing I have confirmed multiple times working on different projects of mine. We have to find where our audience spends their time, find them there and connect with them. And not just with the “add connection” button but with sharing the same values, lifestyle and possibly problems.
He also provides practical tips on how to effectively use digital advertising to target specific audiences and measure the success of our marketing campaigns that I found quite helpful as David points out the importance of measuring the impact of our marketing activities. He discusses various metrics that we can use to track our campaigns such as website traffic, social media engagement, and sales conversions. I think it is vital to learn how to measure our marketing activities in order to track what is successful and what needs changing.
David also discusses the value of storytelling, importance of SEO, role of influencers and power of analytics, all of which I find valuable marketing tools and I believe that every project and company should decide how to approach these aspects. One thing I would like to point out is the importance of visual materials that David also mentions, claiming that using those can catch attention of your prospects much easier than just text based information and I definitely agree, though it depends on your target audience. What I would like to add though, since marketing and technology grows faster and faster, audiovisual materials are something that I would like to use in my next projects because I believe it is for many cases the best way to capture someone's attention nowadays and is easy to combine different types of content - educational, informational, funny, etc. Through audio and visual materials it is easier for our prospects to relate to us and for us to relate to them and that's what we are aiming for.
I would like to add that I really like the concepts David presented in his book and I believe they are all very important and at the time this book was written even quite ahead of its time. However nowadays I feel like these are already quite generally accepted and widely used concepts that I think all of the marketers out there should know. That being said, I believe it is a great book for someone who is a bit marketing untouched.
