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There are two big questions about marketing as a discipline at the moment. Firstly, is it becoming more, or less, important within organisations? Secondly, has digital completely changed what marketing is or has it fundamentally remained the same?

As you might expect we at Centaur, under the Marketing Week and Econsultancy brands, champion the cause of marketing, and marketers, globally. We believe the value of marketing is, rightly, in the ascendancy. We have always maintained that digital marketing does not exist in isolation. It is part of the bigger whole that is marketing. But digital has undeniably brought new aspects to that whole. So what if we were to reconstitute marketing as it is today with digital and classic fully fused? What would that look like?

Here follows our Modern Marketing Manifesto with its suggested twelve constituents. Its aim is to outline why we believe marketing is increasingly valuable and to define what it is to be a modern marketer.

1. Strategy

We believe marketers should sit at the board table and help set strategy. If you do not believe your understanding of markets, products, customers and positioning plays a vital role in shaping strategy then you are not a modern marketer.

Great businesses look beyond the horizon. Great marketers have the vision to define the horizon.

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Once a fun and useful way of presenting data in an easy-to-digest format, infographics have been overused to the point that their reputation is close to ruin.

And yet the truth is that they are still a brilliant way of gaining shares and, more importantly, links back to your site. Our regular infographic roundup remains one of the most consistently popular posts each week.

The trick is to avoid churning out an ugly, unreadable infographic just for some cheap exposure, and concentrate on creating something genuinely valuable for a specific audience. We’ve previously blogged five free online tools that can help with this process.

At Distilled¹s LinkLove conference infographic designer Claire Stokoe gave a talk on how to create the perfect infographic, and it turns out that the fundamentals aren¹t that difficult. However getting it right takes a bit more effort.

The five basic steps are:

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In 2011, marketers began saying that “content marketing is more important than advertising” and given the growth of content marketing in 2012, it would appear that they meant what they said.

And not just in the consumer space. Although selling content marketing to leadership has been a challenge for some B2B marketers, the use of content marketing at B2B organizations is growing rapidly.

As B2B marketers become more familiar with content marketing specifically,best practices are emerging. But that doesn’t mean that mistakes aren’t being made. Here are five of the biggest.

#1: Overemphasizing external distribution channels

Distribution is crucial to any successful content marketing effort and for an obvious reason: great content can’t deliver great results unless it finds its way into the hands of the right people.

Unfortunately, many companies overemphasize external distribution channels. While there’s a role for, say, press releases and social media, content marketing space, it’s important not to underestimate the importance of building up homegrown channels, such as your company’s own website. When used properly, a company website can be a powerful distribution channel and highly effective lead generator.

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The prominence of agencies in today’s digital marketing ecosystem is not surprising: the digital marketing landscape is so complex and seemingly all-encompassing that moving forward alone simply doesn’t seem like a viable option. Agencies aren’t perfect, however, and companies that believe they can simply outsource digital marketing to another firm often learn the hard way that it’s not so simple.

No two businesses are the same, so what gets outsourced and what remains in-house will obviously vary from company to company. But all businesses with in-house marketing staff face many of the same challenges.

Here are seven of the most painful…

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Brands are increasingly paying for ‘Likes’, followers and reviews, and despite the risks associated with this activity and the questionable efficacy of the tactic, there may be a logical reason for it. That reason: according to Nielsen, consumers trust earned media, such as recommendations from friends and online reviews, far more than they do paid media.

That may not be surprising, but the trust gap may be more significant than many brand marketers would like to believe: while 92% of those surveyed indicated that they trust personal recommendations, and 70% indicated that they trust reviews, most forms of traditional and digital paid media are not trusted by more than half of consumers. Television ads fell just short of the 50% mark, with 47% of those polled stating that they trust TV commercials, while digital’s newest darling, mobile, fell far short.

Nielsen’s Global Head of Advertiser Solutions, Randall Beard, writes: Since trust in advertising lays along continuum that moves from earned (highest trust), to owned, then paid (lowest trust), it stands to reason that brands should want more earned and owned. But can paid be given up completely? For most brands, that strategy isn’t really feasible given both the broad reach and historical success associated with paid media. So what’s the answer? Beard suggests that “we need to start thinking of how paid, owned and earned can work together to improve trust and deliver better results.”

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Thanks in large part to the popularity of video on the consumer internet, video has become a more important part of many companies’ B2B content marketing strategies. For obvious reasons, the process of creating an effective B2B video is a bit different than creating a B2C video, but that doesn’t mean that it’s an impossible undertaking.

Here are six tips for B2B companies looking to put video to use as a sales and marketing tool.

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It’s 2:00 p.m. on Sunday. Your brand is buzzing on Twitter and there may be an opportunity to capitalize. Do you know where the folks at your agency are at? While anybody who has worked in agency world for any length of time is familiar with long hours and grueling schedules, there’s a decent chance that the people you need to reach on that hypothetical Sunday afternoon aren’t sitting in front of the office at a computer manning your company’s social media dashboard.

Brian Mandelbaum, an agency executive who has worked at Razorfish and Saatchi & Saatchi, believes that needs to change. So he’s starting a social media-focused agency that promises around-the-clock staffing to ensure that its clients can respond to buzz — good or bad — whenever it strikes.

Mandelbaum tells AdAge that while many agencies are technically 24/7 operations due to their global footprints, most don’t have the social media expertise to effectively manage their clients’ social media presences. There’s also the issue of which offices handle which clients; a client may have a global agency, but most of the time, one or two offices are responsible for its account.

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Since releasing version five of Google Analytics it’s fair to say there have been a few bugs which have needed ironing out. Much of this has now happened but it seems to me that one has gone unnoticed, that of the performance chart feature. In most Google Analytics (GA) reports the button for the performance charting feature can be found just to the right of the report filter box:

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This infographic from InventHelp looks at how brands can measure the success of social media campaigns on Twitter and Facebook. It shows how Google Analytics Assisted Conversions can be used to correlate social media traffic with sales, as well as showing some success stories from brands.

View the infographic

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I can almost guarantee, depending on sector and other broadcast factors, that right now anywhere between 10% and 30% of email subscribers are opening their messages on mobile devices such as iPhones, iPads and Androids.

This stat alone should prompt marketers into thinking about making sure their emails are displaying correctly and effectively on smaller screen sizes. Fortunately, this is where mobileoptimisation and responsive design come in. First, here are some relevant stats to take into account:

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