Marketing has changed.  And so have the people doing it. The breed of new marketers is under 40, successful and experienced – they’ve worked for big corporations and small businesses, and now they’re running their own mini-agencies.

One thing connects them all: they believe marketing is not about selling. Instead, it’s about helping audiences. 

1. They talk like humans, not like businesses

The way marketers communicate with each other, other businesses and even their audiences often sound like unintelligible nonsense. It’s a sure-fire method of distancing themselves from everyone else, even if that’s not the idea. The new marketers use natural language, not business language. They’re easy to understand and they don’t use business-speak to dress up a dull concept. They use creative who share the same values, so the content they make is accessible.

2. They know that many agencies are slow, unimaginative, and expensive

Big agencies have big power. Some do great work. Some win awards. But many are more interested in numbers than results. They’re inefficient, tend to tell the client what they want to hear, and charge huge amounts. 

New marketers don’t work like this. They have small teams, in small offices – if they have an office at all – so the client isn’t paying for their fancy building with its accompanying rent. 

They work quickly and push boundaries – but they listen to the client. And if something isn’t going to work, they’ll say so. 

3. They don’t care about performance marketing

It’s not purely about the numbers. Being able to measure something (leads, open rates, click-throughs) doesn’t make it a success – it just means you can measure it. Instead, there’s a movement towards intuitive marketing, when you’re delivering content through the channels you know your audience responds to.

These are people who believe marketing is about more than generating leads for sales. In fact, they believe marketing is about anything other than generating leads for sales. Especially creating content and then using it. For them, marketing and content is about helping your audience

4. They put their efforts into podcasts, LinkedIn and social media

Podcasts are not exactly new. Neither’s LinkedIn. But does your company have a successful podcast? Do you get enviable engagement on LinkedIn? Or is it more like a couple of comments and a handful of likes? 

Given the time we’ve had to get to grips with these channels and formats, you’d think brands and companies would be doing a better job of using them as a marketing tool. But they’re not. Despite often having huge numbers of followers, many big corporates’ LinkedIn accounts get very low levels of engagement.  

New marketers know that podcasts are the new blogs, even though they’re not new and Seth Godin worked this out a couple of years ago. They have big followings on LinkedIn and they get enviable engagement. They know how to make this content and use it to market themselves and their clients.  

5. They know audiences don’t care about your company, awards, offices, and sometimes, even the product

There’s a new marketing truism: nobody cares about your company. Instead, people care about what you can do for them, whether that’s at a personal or corporate level. 

Like so much of how new marketing operates, this comes back to content. Content that solves problems, helps the audience and avoids any kind of sell is worth something to the audience. New marketers put this sort of content ahead of anything else – then, once they’ve won the trust and interest of the audience, they can start to talk product, benefits, and features.