The marketing skills gap is a hot topic right now. No matter how many clients, colleagues or competitors that I speak with, it’s clear that the marketing industry is facing a skills crisis. And the questions and discussions are often the same:

  • Do we have the right people?
  • How do we understand data and put it to work?
  • Do we have the right technology?
  • What do we do with the technology we’ve already got?
  • How do we plug the gaps?

But it is NOT all doom and gloom. Many of the marketing skills and processes that have been developed over the last few decades are still eminently useful in the digital world. They just need some retraining, cross-training. As I explain on the newly revamped Telstra Exchange blog – marketing is from mars, digital is from venus:

In the traditional world of marketing, we’d think about this as media. We’d break it into paid media, owned and earned. It’s media that is created from a central point and pushed out, interrupting the lives of our audiences with its urgency. Even where that media is “earned” or “social”, it’s still created with a particular focus and intention. And from the inside of our marketing command centre we run the sums. Counting, measuring, assessing and reporting.

Read the full article here.