Introduction

Let’s start with a quote:

“You cannot do today’s job with yesterday’s methods and still be successful in business tomorrow”.

(George W. Bush).

Have you noticed that most of us are nevertheless sticking to what worked yesterday? I hope you are not all trying to prove the former president of the USA wrong. I don’t think he is, but I have a strong feeling that many are waiting on the sidelines for the right moment to jump in and embrace new modern, digital and social behavior. Stop waiting and jump before it is too late.

Let me start by formulating some interesting questions that relate to some of the issues I have encountered over the past few years:

• Are you afraid that new innovative companies will take away your business with a disruptive customer acquisition strategy?
• Did you see a decrease in effectiveness of your current sales or customer acquisition strategy?
• Is your company struggling with its first and second steps on social media? Or are you quite active online, but not really generating the expected additional revenue?
• Have you noticed that some marketing actions are able to generate a lot of interest and engagement, but you have no clue how to replicate this result?
• Are your marketing and sales departments not teaming up, acting together and therefore not reaching their full potential?
• Do you have the impression that sales and marketing are separate businesses?
• Have you heard of growth hacking? If so, do you believe it is a marketing technique only for technology startups?

Have you answered yes to any of the question above? Keep reading, as this booklet will provide you with some new and valuable insights and countless tips and tricks that will help you attract more business.

The goal is to provide a framework and new school of thought that will help and guide you in your business immediately. Although the main focus is B2B, most of the concepts and strategies will work equally well for B2C.

The goal of this booklet is to provide an introduction to smarketing and to work out some new tactics, based on growth hacking, in implementing a smarketing approach. For readers new to this field, and to better understand the provided smarketing methology, this booklet starts with an introduction to inbound and content marketing. Marketeers that are accustomed to the ins and outs of inbound marketing can skip the first paragraphs and start reading at the paragraph about putting the ‘S’ in smarketing.

The Copernican revolution in marketing

Outbound vs inbound

What is marketing? Marketing is the art of communicating about a product, service or brand to customers, for the purpose of promoting or selling that product, service, or brand. Thanks to the Internet, marketing has evolved rapidly over the past few years. Two main approaches can be identified:

1. Outbound: the oldest one is the traditional form of marketing that is product-oriented. A company initiates the conversation and pushes its message out to an audience. Hence the reason it is also called push marketing.
2. Inbound: the second and more recent approach is customer-oriented. It is all about attracting and earning the attention of customers, and is therefore also called pull marketing.

The way modern consumers shop or make purchases has changed dramatically for both B2B and B2C. In order for businesses to survive they must adapt now.

Before the internet era (the pre-information age)

Pre-internet, consumers searching for a specific product or service had limited tools for informing themselves. They had the yellow pages and their landline phone, and some magazines. Word of mouth was still one of the strongest ways you could hear about a nice product or service. Compared to today, resources were limited.