Building Buzz

Bottom line, marketers now face more challenges than ever. How you advertise your products and services, how you get media coverage, how you create brand awareness – have all changed radically in recent years.

Lots of new technologies have come into play, of course, but that’s only half the story. The other half is that a new kind of consumer has evolved – one with high expectations shaped by their “always on” lives, their exposure to new media tactics and their own embrace of social media. One study points out that younger consumers are more heavily influenced by recommendations from friends and trusted sources than brand strength compared to other age groups.

They may be influenced by all kinds of digital/print/broadcast media, including your carefully planned media buys, but these are not passive consumers. They’re participants. They’ll give brand loyalty when it’s deserved, but they demand a two-way conversation in order to build a relationship with the brands that are important to them.

A new kind of marketer has emerged as well. Ten or fifteen years ago, a marketing officer might have spoken vaguely about wanting to “add” an online component as an “adjunct” channel. A committee would hire a consultant. They’d produce a nice static, text-heavy, “brochureware” website and the web address would get added to everyone’s business cards. End of story. Even worse, the marketing director would take a stack of brochures and hand them to the webmaster and walk out.

Now, the internet has become a company’s primary mechanism for two-way communication – a real conversation – with consumers. Now, it’s the first place marketers commit budget because it’s the first place consumers look for information. Even as fewer people read print ads or watch commercials on network television, more people are searching for products and services online. They’re reading crowd-sourced reviews, and they’re paying attention to the recommendations of powerful online influencers.

So the average marketing officer today is not only working feverishly to make that old brochureware site more engaging and more interactive, but also trying to juggle a dozen other very different kinds of online channels, all hooked into an increasingly complex online ecosystem where marketing and media overlap and most of the old rules have been thrown out window.

The industry has gone through profound changes, and, as the founding partner of an interactive agency, I’ve had a ringside seat for most of the fun.

The game really began to change at the turn of the millennium, with the rise of search marketing. Then the pace of change accelerated once again as social media moved into the mainstream. Now we are in the midst of another surge, as semantic technologies spread.