January 25, 2006 | Wednesday
Latitude in NMA Explains Marketing supplement
By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in Marketing |Online Sales |Search Expertise
If you’ve got an early copy of this week’s New Media Age - which (lucky us!) we seem to every week - you will have noticed quite a large presence from Latitude in the magazine’s NMA Explains Marketing supplement.
Latitude CSMO Paul Doleman has the intro opinion piece in the supplement, entitled Balance of Power. Click below to read the entire article.
“Your failed business model is not my problem.” So reads a t-shirt that is selling like gangbusters online. This phrase sums up the attitude of increasingly information-rich, net-savvy customers online, and presents a monumental challenge for businesses and how they market themselves. This impudence comes from the rise of what engagement marketing guru Alan Moore refers to as ‘curated consumption’.
Recent years have seen the growing popularity of personalised, on-demand ‘content’ – what people outside of the marketing industry think of as just cool, useful stuff. Critically, people can now can access that stuff on a 24/7, anywhere-with-a-net-connection basis – and take it with them on their iPods or mobiles.
Curated consumption means never having to sit through the ads during your favourite show when you watch it on your PVR. It also means you can create your own newspaper by subscribing to the RSS feeds of the online sources you rate, and that you only pay for the music you really want, buying mp3s from iTunes and listening to them in the order you want.
In short, the audience at whom you market is no longer a mass of demographics whose only choice is to take what you give them, in the format you specify. They are individuals who know all too well that their choice of personal relevance in media is at an unprecedented height – and getting greater by the hour.
As it happens, people have plenty of cool, useful stuff waiting for them on the web. In many cases, they themselves are creating it. The word ‘consumer’ is now rendered a misnomer online, where those formerly known as consumers are now creators. The commercial world now wants to take part in this.
The tables have turned, and while it is possible to have a seat on both sides, it is no longer the big boys deciding the table manners.
Some companies are learning this the hard way. The most expensive logo and brand strategy team in the world can’t convince a disgruntled customer not to blog about how your service was so bad that he wishes he’d never put a penny in your pockets.
When there were only a few channels in existence – TV, radio, print – companies fed on that scarcity. The web changes everything. What is scarce now is trust. Companies must cultivate trust to market effectively.
So what is going to drive what happens in online marketing over the next 12 months?
The answer is familiar: ROI. As the measurement of return on investment becomes increasingly important, companies are looking to more reliable and tangibly beneficial methods of selling online. That desire for higher conversions of impressions and clicks to sales is leading to a more granular approach to marketing. This is where attempting to appeal to the mass market – that nebulous, faceless blob of demographic figures – loses substantial ground to maximising the appeal to niches.
Relevance and value are the drivers in this search for maximum ROI. Just as the web allows for two-way exchange of knowledge and opinions, so it allows for two-way exchange of value between companies and individuals. You give the right ones something valuable, and they’ll reciprocate, be it immediately with their cash or those other prized commodities: their attention and trust.
In search, providing relevant products and services to highly targeted audiences is paramount. The methods used to identify those audiences and determine what they want may vary, but the better the niche is being identified, the better they are being served – and the more they are likely to buy.
Those who recognise the importance of this focus stand to gain. That goes for agencies as well as clients.
Specialities are now even more crucial to online marketing. These things are no longer optional: intimate familiarity with the context of what an agency does (be it search or another function), specialist knowledge, and expert implementation. The value provided by agencies, just like the value their clients provide to customers, trumps all.
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