First idea: the dream of any business is to see its customers come to it for themselves.
In reality, marketing has a cost and the competition has exactly the same dream as you.
Second idea: the measurement of a mass audience has now become democratized and is no longer a technique reserved for centralized media.
To measure an audience, all you need is a website on the Internet.
Third idea: of these first two ideas follows the rise of so-called inbound marketing, which consists of sending content such that it attracts new customers.
Inbound marketing is different from outbound marketing, which gets customers where they are, by bombarding them.
For inbound marketing, there is no place to look for customers. There are only flows of visitors more or less voluminous and more or less relevant.
They probably come from somewhere, but it’s less important than knowing where they are going and what motivates them.
The bottom line is that they come to visit you.
The emergence of inbound marketing is inseparable from the development of the IT tools that make it possible, including CMS (content management system), MAP (marketing automation platform) and CRM (customer relationship management).
These tools are part of the foundation that Presans calls the digital capacity of organizations (digital enablement), one of the five attributes of open organizations.
The better a company can integrate these different applications into a functional whole, the higher its digital capacity.
Fourth idea: corporate dreams are not just populated by customers attracted to them spontaneously. There are also candidates for employment in perfect harmony with their needs and their culture.
But the same inbound marketing techniques can be applied to the management of the employer brand. The idea remains the same: to emit content as it attracts good candidates to the company. And measure.
Fifth idea: in general, a company that emits good content will attract to it various useful incoming flows, be they customers, employees, investors, partners, suppliers, actors public.
It is not surprising that marketing is at the forefront of this trend of opening organizations. Indeed, marketing is a construction function that is more outward looking and in demand for data.
The digital transformation of companies thus finds in the marketing function a natural ally, happy to have a precise measurement of the impact of its budget.
Sixth idea: Good content is content that puts a business at the center of a theme, discussion, and market.
In a fluid world, the criterion of a good positioning is to become a center attracting useful flows.
Being at the center of the flows, is not this just what characterizes platforms and inspiring missions?
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This article is partly inspired by an interview with Guillaume Vigneron of La Super Agence.
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