Just a Book, Part 1: B2B Marketing Needs "Hacking Marketing"

Watch this video to hear Scott Brinker introduce “Hacking Marketing”! Here you’ll learn how to go from ho-hum marketer to marketing scientist by honing agility, innovation, scalability and inspiring talent.

Welcome to the Just a Book blog series! For the next four weeks we’ll be recapping Scott Brinker’s, marketer acclaimed, “Hacking Marketing.” Each Tuesday we’ll be highlighting what you need to know to “˜hack’ how you approach marketing. Prepare to rethink everything you thought was true about hacking and brace yourself for revelations on how to become more agile, scalable and innovative with your marketing.

Since the beginning of the digital age, hackers have been known to break connections and, in general, create a huge mess. In “Hacking Marketing” this is not the case. In this context, hacking is in reference to building, streamlining and cleaning up management inefficiency. The Hacker Way, coined by Facebook, encourages sharing of information that leads to continuous improvement and new iterations.

Traditional forms of marketing have been in existence years before people were logging onto social media, email and other marketing primed platforms. While the occasional direct mailer and printed newsletter might make its way onto your desk, there is no denying that marketing has become deeply intertwined with the digital world making it faster, easier and sneakier to get your message in front of your targeted audience. What some call digital marketing, Brinker eloquently refers to as marketing in a digital world. Adapt this mind set, and you are well on your way to hacking marketing.

How can you become a master hacker?

Let’s go over how you can effectively do your job in a digital world. As a marketer, you must now think of yourself as a software developer. Developers refine layer after layer of information and wrap it all up in something aesthetically pleasing. Think of it as a cake. All of your layers make up the important parts of the cake and come together under a sheath of icing to create one comprehensive, not to mention good looking, campaign. Software developers complete their work in the exact same way.

The big question is, what can marketers learn from software developers to better hack marketing? First, trying something new, rather than following the same old recipe, is a viable ticket to improvement. Second, don’t veer too far off the recipe when working in a digital world. Sometimes pragmatism and doing what’s best for the company, while continuing low risk experiments on the side will produce favorable results in the long run.

Check back every Tuesday for a weekly recap. Next week we’ll be covering agility and how integrating agile management methods is an effective way to hack marketing and the importance of increasing the speed of management versus the speed of work.