Marketers: Give Up The ‘Generic, Faceless Prospect’

Businesses that spend energy telling customers about their products are wasting money, according to David Meerman Scott, author of "The New Rules of Marketing & PR."

"I've got news for you, nobody cares about your products and services," Scott said during his remarks at Monday's Inbound Marketing Summit. The all-day meeting, held in Cambridge, was put together by Boston-based HubSpot.

Inbound marketing - as opposed to the more traditional outbound marketing of direct mail or television advertising - "is about delivering content at the precise moment your customer needs it," he said. That content can include video clips, white papers, press releases, blogs or e-books, which he described as "the hip and stylish younger sister to the nerdy white paper."

Scott urged the 260 attendees of the workshop to embrace inbound marketing to drive web sales. The key, he said, is not to think like a marketer, but to "think like publishers" to produce online content that attracts online consumers of information.

In order to provide the right content at the right time, Scott said businesses should develop "customer personas" and talk directly - in plain language - to those people.

But in order to figure out what a company's "customer personas" are, an exec must get out of his or her "comfortable office," he said.

Scott also criticized the business-world's reliance on "gobbledygook," or jargon-laced company overviews. He contacted about a dozen journalists and put together a list of the top "gobbledygook" terms that are overused by companies. The list includes: next generation, robust, flexible, world class, easy to use, scalable and cutting edge.

Other speakers at the conference included, Seth Godin, author of "Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable." During his keynote address, he said marketing is no longer about the "stuff you make," but about "the stories that you tell."

He also called today's world "an era of emotional marketing," and challenged the audience by asking whether they love what they sell.

"If you don't love it, you either have to fix it or leave it," he said.