Jan
15
Traditional forms of advertising start with the advertiser, their product, and the message they want to PUSH out to target customers. Marketing in the new Age of Digital requires something different. The most successful forms of “new” marketing starts with the consumer and their information needs. Modern consumers are in the habit of searching for information and doing research in order to make an informed purchase decision and will no longer simply take the advertisers’ word for it or simply trust the ad message pushed at them. They have different missing links – bits of information they need — during their research process. The following article explores this topic in more depth …
Excerpt:
The right info, at the right time, to the right person, through the right device.
So, couldn’t every person have a different missing link? Yes. Doesn’t that mean that it would be very hard if not impossible to identify every customer’s missing link, let alone solve it? Yes. And even if we could identify each user’s missing link, wouldn’t it be cost-prohibitive to get a message out to each individual addressing his missing link? Yes.
All of the above would be unfathomable in the age of one-way media. But in the new digital landscape there are new tools, services, and methods which can help solve these missing links; these were simply not available in the “one-way media” world. For example, while conversations were always happening around water-coolers, no one but the parties to the conversation could hear it. Now, more and more such conversations are happening online and are “archived” in forums, social networks, and blogs for everyone to see. Marketers simply have to look at what questions people are asking of each other to pick out some missing links — e.g. the “is PCI-Express 2.0 backward compatible” question. Marketers may even get clues to how to solve some of the missing links. For example, dozens of reviews of a digital camera by real people who have actually used it may yield the answer to the “what battery does it use” question and even suggest a real-life usage scenario benefit like “because the camera uses standard AAA batteries, you can find AAA batteries at any convenience store or gas station along the way, a major convenience in case you forgot your charger!”
continue reading about missing link marketing …
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