Marketing, recently got a lot easier, all you need to have is an internet connection and a little creativity and you can expect to market almost anything. You could upload video demonstrations of your product on Youtube, create Facebook and MySpace communities around your product, create snazzy viral marketing campaigns that almost cost nothing.
TV Radio and the Internet:
However, Marketing also just got a helluva lot harder than ever before! Rewind 15 years, all you had was TV and radio advertising. If you were a large corporation, you had to create kick-ass commercials and you could get noticed. Otherwise you had the option of Direct Marketing, where you could mail out solicited/unsolicited advertisements to a large population and reap rewards (a response rate of 3% is considered exceedingly good in direct marketing). People even got a little smarter and started targeting their marketing efforts, by figuring out the demographics of consumers, by analyzing their buying patterns and so on.
Even 5 years back, when the Internet era dawned, all companies had to worry about was how to add this new marketing channel to the existing portfolio, how much to allocate to it and where to advertise. It was still all about advertisements.
Forward to 2008:
Then suddenly something happened in the websphere, sites like Youtube became a craze, social networking became a simple way of life for a majority of the population. Web communities became a powerful driving force in many product categories (remember Jeff Jarvis's blog entries on bad Dell customer service that brought the company to its knees forcing them to act).
This is a new era of Marketing, and Marketers used to the old ways of life are not going to be successful here. Again, as is the case with any systemic change, this is also an opportunity. Companies that re-learn their basics and re-invent themselves will survive while others will perish. Here is a fantastic article that talks about the changes and how companies can do well in the new environment:
The key takeaways from the article:
1. Consumer attention is the most valuable resource in marketing today, get creative in ways to get their attention and utilize it to the fullest for the fleeeting moment when you have it.
2. Do not fear the "cloud" or online communities, instead getting involved with them and even nurturing them can lead to better product design, quicker customer feedback and in the end, much better customer loyalty. Some companies are directly leveraging such communities in product design, market research and in user-generated advertising content!
3. Pay special attention to niche communities related to your product categories. "When they're efficiently targeted, they can be highly responsive, lucrative and loyal".
4. The days of insanely successful memes are almost over, instead create intelligent "bemes" that customers will readily accept and share with others. "The best online marketing now takes place among people who know and trust each other".
5. Finally, stop thinking about Internet as an extension to your brick-and-morter operations. Instead think of the online and offline shopping experience as part of the same consumer experience continuum. Rethink the synergies between the two. Build a complete shopping experience, not just a website and a store.
