Crowdsourcing has become a great part of marketing and product development. From the Best Buy campaign the the Dell campaign, we as users have become so empowered, we now have a say in how things are made. Microsoft has taken this “Crowdsourcing” idea one step further, but actually advertising their crowdsourcing outcomes for the new Windows 7. Below is a montage of several ads put together, but the main idea is the same… Show the people who spoke up to help us build the best Windows Operating System ever. What are your thoughts?
Over the past week we have been discussing how to build a brand in today’s business environment. In Part 1, we discovered how to break down the consumer population into highly targeted, highly defined segments of individuals. Part 2, we discussed how to create a “segment story” for each segment portraying a relevant message around the core brand idea. Now we get to put this information to work for us and begin to build brand awareness of our brand.
Building awareness in today’s overly communicated environment is no easy task. Every company in the world is trying to get a share of mind of your target segments. We need to develop a strategy that makes the consumer comfortable with our brand as well as begin a dialog with the consumer to a point where they will communicate in return. The main goal of brand awareness is to get the consumer to raise their hand and ask for more communication.
In the past, we built brand awareness through mass marketing. Plastering our brand all over TV, Radio, Print, and Outdoor would, for sure, drive awareness to our brand. But the saturation of these media as well as the shrinking attention span of the consumer has created a decline in this type of effectiveness. With that said, I still believe there is a need for this mass marketing to some extent. Below I have identified a strategy to generate awareness, which includes traditional marketing.
Two Steps to Build Awareness
Traditional Marketing/Advertising: This long standing strategy has been effective for years and will always have a place in marketing. This type of marketing is great to get the consumers comfortable in seeing your brand and even driving some consumers to take action. The mass appeal is and will forever be dead though. The use of traditional marketing/advertising has be highly targeted to our niche segments we identified in Part 1 and needs to portray the core brand message through the respected segment story outlined in Part 2. The goal with the traditional media component is to get the consumer familiar with your brand in their life. So, next time they are looking for your product/service and your brand comes up, it is a viable option.
Content Marketing: The other half of the strategy is content marketing. This is basically where you display and discuss relevant content targeted at your niche segments. This is typically done in blog, website, or social formats. Having relevant content designed and communicated for each particular niche segment is the key component in this marketing strategy. Building off the comfort level we created with traditional marketing, we can begin to start a dialog with the consumer when they run across our information in this online environment during their discovery process. The goal of content marketing is to get the consumer to become educated enough about our brand and how we would fit into their individual lifestyle that they raise their hand and engage in a conversation.
Conclusion
Building awareness is a very tough thing to do in today’s environment. A mixture of traditional marketing and content marketing that is highly targeted and relevant to our niche segments is the most successful strategy to become a viable option in their world. We need to make the consumer feel comfortable with our brand and be able to see how our brand would fit into their personal lifestyle.
Your Thoughts
What are your thoughts? Have you seen anything working in today’s environment that isn’t discussed here? What strategies do you utilize to build brand awareness these days?
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As we all know there is a transition of power in the business world today. Gone are the days of brands telling consumers what to think and how to act. Gone are the days of running a clever TV ad to increase sales. Gone are the days of multi-million dollar media budgets. With the growth of the internet and various social technologies we have seen consumers becoming more and more educated, powerful, and interconnected. It has gotten to the point where someone with a Twitter account can raise such hell that they can cause a multi-billion dollar company to discontinue a particular ad campaign (sorry Motrin). Consumers now want to be engaged and want to be listened to. They want to build a relationship and expect the brand to be molded to fit into their own personal lifestyle. But how can brands do this through marketing?
The short answer is you can’t. Many companies and brands are flocking to this new found social realm to “push” more messages where the people are, I mean after all it’s worked in the past. But these messages are not being received and are actually pushing these individuals farther and farther away from the company. In his post, “Social Media excels at making things happen indirectly,” Mack Collier discusses this in more detail and states:
“The problem that most companies have with social media is this:
1 - They view social media as being a new marketing channel, when actually they are communication channels
2 - Since they view social media as a marketing channel, they attempt to push marketing messages through these channels
3 - Since they view social media as a marketing channel, and attempt to push marketing messages through these channels, they attempt to directly monetize their social media efforts.”
Marketing, at its core, is the ability for a company to attract, keep, and, maintain a customer as an advocate. So in the new world where the consumer has power, marketers need to adapt to fit into the lifestyle of each individual. No more pushing messages. No more telling people what to think; just good, old-fashioned conversations. Listen, respond, and listen some more. When given an open forum to communicate, people will reveal their souls. When your relationship reaches that point, you have an advocate, the Holy Grail in the marketing world.
No, it’s not a pretty as a clever mass advertising campaign, but its human nature. It’s what we, as marketers should have been doing a long time ago. What are your thoughts?
Paul Miser is a social interaction junkie; ever-chasing the perfect fit for the social communication strategies into the integrated marketing concept.
