When most people think about marketing they think banners, flyers, and advertisements in order to get information across to their consumers. However, as David Meerman Scott says multiple times in his book, there are old ways of doing things and new ways and that is what we will be focusing on. Many marketers that prefer the traditional way of marketing may find it hard to adjust to some of the strategies that Scott explains in his book, but in order to stay ahead you have to stay up to date.
Content-driven, inbound marketing allows for the consumers to be directly connected to what is being discussed. Consumers are pushing the conversations now and instead of someone else bringing up and discussing the topics at hand, the consumers have taken it upon themselves to use the resources available to them to become the marketers themselves.
Let’s take a look at the way things have changed, beginning with the traditional way of marketing.
Traditional:
We’ve all heard of interruption marketing or some form of interruption marketing. This would be where you are watching television and all of a sudden and ad pops up in the middle of your show. It is taking you away from your show and you are being interrupted. The same held true in the print world. Looking into magazines you would be reading an article and flipping through the magazine when until, BOOM, a large ad in multi-color popped up and interrupted your reading. Now that it is understood what the older, more traditional version of marketing was, let’s move onto the ways Scott says the marketplace has changed, and is still changing.
New and Improved:
Scott lays out a list of rules that he finds to be the “New Rules of Marketing and PR” and what he uses as the guide for his book. These rules are as follow:
- Marketing is more than just advertising
- PR is for more than just a mainstream media audience
- You are what you publish
- People want authenticity, not spin.
- People want participation, not propaganda
- Instead of causing one-way interruption, marketing is about delivering content at just the precise moment your audience needs it.
- Marketers must shift their thinking from mainstream marketing to the masses to a strategy of reaching vast numbers of underserved audiences via the web.
- PR is not about your boss seeing your company on TV. It’s about your buyers seeing your company on the web.
- Marketing is not about your agency winning awards. It’s about your organization winning business.
- The Internet has made public relations public again, after years of almost exclusive focus on media.
- Companies must drive people into the purchasing process with great online content.
- Blogs, online video, e-books, news releases, and other forms of online content let organizations communicate directly with buyers in a form they appreciate.
- Social networks allow people all over the world to share content and connect with the people and companies they do business with.
- On the web, the lines between marketing and PR have blurred.
Phew! Now, I know that seems like a lot of different (to some!) rules in comparison to what you thought you knew about marketing.
Looking at some of these individually it is interesting to realize that social media and the web have really encouraged and pushed these new rules to become so vital. For example, take number 3 on the list, “You are what you publish.” Think about how many times we are told as college students even that whatever we put on the web is forever there and will never be gone. Well it is the same in marketing. Whatever you publish will be what your company will be thought of as. This became a very important rule when it became so easy for things to go viral with the help of the Internet.
Let’s look at another one. Number 5 on the list is about people wanting to participate rather than have propaganda just thrown at them. Well competitions and sweepstakes are prime examples of good marketing techniques that allow people to participate and become directly involved in their brand of choice. It brings the consumer to the brand and allows them to become invested more so than ever.
One last one that we can look at is number 10, Internet making public relations public again. Now a day it is very hard to hide your skeletons in your closet and your affairs, etc. With the Internet being accessible to everyone it allows for full transparency. Like Scott says it makes it public again. People know things because they can find out about whatever they want on the web. It is easy and convenient. This is bringing consumers and buyers even closer to their companies and to the brands themselves.
Scott does not stop at his book in order to inform the public about the new ways of marketing. He shows them with his own blog and is practicing what he is preaching. His blog can be found at: http://www.webinknow.com/.
One particular post I found interesting, because of the fact that I am a double major in both marketing and journalism, was his post labeled “How Raytheon implemented a brand journalism approach to content marketing”.
He again, in this blog post, talks about how the content drives the media. It is the content that makes people want to read and listen or it is the content that drives people to do something (call to action). Journalists know how to write stories and being a marketer or working in PR you have to tell a story so if you can get a marketer who can tell a story you have struck gold. Everyone has a story and that is what people want to know. As Holly Stewart once stated in a visit to our class, “it is all about the story.” You can easily sell the story and people want to listen if it is compelling enough!
Looking past Scott’s book I was doing some research on my own and I found another article that too agreed that social media is one of the most important ways in order to communicate and engage your customers. So after realizing this and reading the article and Scott’s book I decided to look into brands that used social media best.
A recent Forbes article ranked the top three brands for using social media to engage their customers and their rankings were as follows: Subway, Google, and Target. To find their top ten you can visit the article, but this just goes to show you that places that are engaging their customers through social media are gaining attention.
“Subway continuously manages to sell promoted deals without pushing the advertising theme too far, according to Vivaldi. Things like Subway’s “Flavorizer,” which lets users build and name a sandwich, promote brand identity with its followers.”
“Google benefits from its expansive product portfolio that consumers use in their daily lives, including Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, Google+ and Google search.”
The brand [Target] “has a well-organized social strategy across networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr and LinkedIn. There is something for everyone on Facebook, including applications designed for newlyweds, bargain hunters, the tech savvy and everything in between.”
After reading the article and Scott’s book I realized that the world of marketing is changing and has changed for the better. Lucky for us we are on top of our game already and have already begun marketing our brand: OURSELVES!
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