"The New Rules of Marketing" Gets a Makeover

This is a guest blog post by David Meerman Scott, Marketer-in-Residence at HubSpot and a best selling author.

The New Rules of Marketing and PR was originally published in 2007. Man, have we come a long way! In 2006, when I was writing the book, HubSpot had just been founded, Twitter didn't yet exist, and Facebook was only for students.

The online marketing universe has been evolving rapidly and the new edition of my book reflects many of these changes.

The New Stuff: Real-time & Mobile Marketing

The high adoption rate of Foursquare and other GPS-enabled mobile sharing apps asks businesses to learn how to market with these tools. I've already discussed how companies that participate in real-time communication are more successful. Your business can gain a significant competitive advantage when it responds to feedback promptly, develops products or services instantly and does PR aligned with current news and events. Now technology allows us to engage in this real-time aspect of marketing.

The Old Stuff: Same Concepts

One thing that doesn’t change in any of the editions is the concept that the web is an essential way to market. The idea that you no longer have to rely exclusively on buying advertising and begging mainstream media to cover you is liberating! Creating great content (a YouTube video, blog post, ebook, photo, infographic, and the like) truly brands an organization as one that’s worthy of doing business with.

Common Marketing Challenges

Getting started is one of the most common challenges my readers share. They often struggle with the marketing shift from products and services to buyer personas and content creation. Another challenge they face is in making the jump from offline marketing techniques and programs (such as direct mail, trade shows, and advertising) to reaching buyers on the web. 

Help Is on the Way

Taking a suggestion from Toby Jenkins and Adam Franklin of Australian web strategy firm Bluewire Media, I devised an aid to tackling these challenges, and this aid appears for the first time in the new edition of the book: a simple marketing and PR strategy planning template.

This template was created to help people implement strategies for reaching buyers directly and it's built on the fundamental principles I discuss throughout the third edition of The New Rules of Marketing and PR.

For instance, I point out that when you publish valuable information (videos, blogs, Twitter feeds, e-books, and so on), you are creating the sorts of links that search engine algorithms love. Thus, your content surfaces when buyers are looking for help solving their problems!

Hope this template and the third edition of my book can help you design effective marketing strategies and reach your business goals. Let me know what you think!

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