Most of us spent a good portion of our professional careers in the pre-internet era. Marketing in the pre-internet era for business-to-business (B2B) companies (majority of printers) consisted mostly of creating supporting materials for your sales team. Other forms of marketing were typically categorized as “brand recognition activities” including but not limited to radio spots, TV ads, newspaper ads, magazines, billboards, and yellow page advertisements. The “content” in the pre-internet era of marketing was what I call polished marketing fluff about your company, products, and services. The content was all about you and there wasn’t that much of it. Once a year you had to come up with some text to fill out the new brochure.

Pre-internet era marketing was a one-way communication. You produced content about your company and pushed it out to your target audience. You had full control and responsibility for the distribution of your marketing materials which had limited reach – typically delivered to one person, possibly consumed once, and then discarded. In the internet era, almost everything about marketing has changed primarily due to an unlimited and essentially free distribution system (the internet).

Traditional marketing was outbound marketing – you created content and pushed it out, interrupted many and hoped that it was relevant to a few. A one-way communication system, in the language of business, the sell side of the transaction had a distinct advantage in product knowledge and understanding of suitable alternatives. Today we compete in a landscape where marketing is now a conversation, the customer gets to talk back and the customer is more informed than ever, understanding and having access to alternatives with the click of a mouse or a touch on a mobile device. The marketing content you produce in the internet era has virtually unlimited distribution and lives forever (or until you take it down).