What Is Marcom?

Marcom is a relatively new term describing a growing movement where “marketing” and “communications” work in lockstep to achieve business goals. In years past, an organization’s marketing group worked on primarily inbound activities (i.e., getting prospects and customers to come to them), while the communications team focused on outbound efforts (ensuring stakeholders and influencers viewed the company and its products in the best light). That’s a vast over-simplification of what each side does, but it’s a start.

Some people hate the term Marcom, while others see it as a natural growth of today’s digital marketing and traditional communications efforts. I’m in the latter camp.

No matter where you stand on the term, you can’t deny the fact that Content makes the world go ’round. You need content to pitch to the media. You need content to blog about. You need content to write press releases about (Interesting press releases). You need content to impress industry analysts and to close sales opportunities. You need content for webinars, landing pages, web pages; the list goes on.

But, your organization’s narrative shouldn’t change whether you’re talking about the benefits of your SaaS solution on a web page, talking to someone on social media, or briefing analysts at Gartner. And expecting your Marketing team–who talk to customers, sales, and the product teams–and your Communications team–who talk to influencers, the media, employees, investors, and analysts–to stay on the same page at all times is a challenge in the best of times.

That’s why many practitioners today believe a better approach, is through Marcom.

Today’s Marcom practitioners aren’t specialists, they’re generalists and know a lot about a lot. They understand how to bring together Public Relations (PR), digital marketing (SEO, SEM, User Experience), Analysts, Events Marketing, Product Marketing, even Internal Communications, all to drive more and better results.