In a break from traditional format, the February 18, 2010, Power Lunch featured an interactive Q & A session with three of Austin’s marketing leaders. Panelists Aaron Strout (CMO at Powered), Jay Hallberg (co-founder and VP of Marketing & New Business Development at Spiceworks), and Sam Decker (CMO at Bazaarvoice) fielded questions on marketing trends, tools, and challenges.
Highlights from the Session
What are the biggest marketing trends you anticipate in 2010?
Aaron: Expects to see people playing more seriously with social media marketing and starting to figure out effective ways to leverage mobile/geo-location marketing.
Jay: Expects to see some order emerging from the chaos of marketers experimenting with social media management tools. Platforms will start to come together and leaders will emerge in this market.
Sam: Expects to see the continuing growth of digital word-of-mouth via user-generated content and companies pursuing how to best participate in, learn from, and leverage those conversations.
Can you recommend marketing tools?
Aaron: Encourages marketers to beware getting tangled up in analytics and instead keep the focus on goal setting. Start by clearly defining your goal and work backward to figure out what you need to do to achieve it.
Jay: SalesForce CRM; CoTweet Twitter marketing management.
Sam: Google Analytics is a great place to start; URL shorteners that let you track the source of your Web traffic such as budURL.
What kind of skill set does today’s marketer need to be a competitive job candidate?
Aaron: Looks for “middle brain marketers”—people who can be analytical and then do something creative with that data. Compartmentalization of job roles, with the data crunchers in one corner and the artists in another corner, is decreasing.
Jay: Looks for people who can learn on the fly and who are able to become comfortable with social media marketing techniques in addition to traditional media marketing.
Sam: Google Analytics is a great place to start; URL shorteners that let you track the source of your Web traffic such as budURL.
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