This article was previously published on Forbes.com, written by Marie Wiese, member of Forbes Agency Council.
I am an old school marketer: I started my marketing career long before Google, social media or the iPhone. I started marketing just as email and browsers were being introduced to the world — when cell phones were the size of a lap dog. Things like servers and databases were still a mystery to marketers. They were things that the IT department worried about, not the marketing team.
But then everything changed: marketers had to adapt to search engines and an algorithm we could not see, touch or feel. Machines were deciding who got on page one and who didn’t. Machines were taking over the marketing function and quite possibly the world.
The Story Of Man Versus Machine Is Not New
Many songs and books have been written about John Henry, an African-American folk hero in a famous man-versus-machine story of the industrial revolution. Henry, according to legend, tested his steel-driving skills against a steam-powered hammer. He won but died of stress soon after, still holding his hammer.
What Machines Mean To Marketers
The world has dramatically changed — not just since Henry’s time, but even in the last five years. As marketers, we have watched Google’s about-face with respect to the importance of people consuming content versus machine manipulated web pages.
But even as some of the most respected technologists in the world proclaim our downfall if machines win the battle, it has not slowed down technological advancement. It has only made things more complicated for marketers of all shapes and sizes. There was a time when being a creative individual was enough to get you into marketing. Today’s marketer spends much more time figuring out marketing automation and CRM tools, studying data and looking at screens. Today’s marketer has to not only understand the machine, they have to figure out how to manipulate and game it so humans will pay attention.
So which side does the modern marketer choose?
There is a constant battle occurring at our agency when we visit the editorial calendar. After carefully designing a keyword strategy based on what humans look for when they purchase a product or service, as well as the questions they ask and the places they visit to build trust before they shortlist a product or service, we still argue about humans versus machines. The technical team wants to override an article with awkward, clunky keywords that will help the content perform, while the creative side of the house wants to create elegant prose and witty copy void of keywords or machine-driven direction. The battle rages on as we look to see what performed and what worked.
Humans are the element every marketer should start with when designing a buying path to lead a searching prospect down. But how they arrived at the journey is often the work of a machine and how that path worked in the cogs of its massive wheels. I don’t think one side is better than the other — man with machine is the norm today.
As a new-age marketer, I believe that to be successful today, you need to be many things: a creative, a project manager, a technologist and a data analyst. It’s not enough anymore to come up with brilliant ideas or ad copy. You need to figure out how to optimize them for search. Opening an Instagram account does not make you a social media expert; understanding how the platform works and how humans behave using the tool is more important than what you create on it. Slick copy or pretty pictures are a waste of time if they can’t achieve the ultimate goal: helping buyers and consumers decide what to buy, what to pick and who follow. It’s more important to understand how the ultimate buyer goes on the purchase journey. To do this, marketers need to embrace machines and machine-driven activities, not just as platforms but for the process behind the platform.
