In the financial year just gone, it was refreshing to hear an Australian broadcasting giant such as Kerry Stokes declare traditionalmedia still rules’.
An unprompted announcement of this sort gives even more credence to our mantra that online marketing strategies are re-arranging the business landscape; especially at a B2B level and in favour of those who never had the budget to match the dreams or those who didn’t have a voice at all. Why?
Because it’s very clear that online content now has business growth strategies power for these reasons:
- Speed and control
- Price
- Reach
- Permanence and legacy
- Analytics and tracking
Without any prompting, an announcement of this nature by Mr Stokes is a little like a sports coach unexpectedly announcing their job is still safe, or a politician making a positive announcement about the environment for no apparent reason.
In our view the complete opposite is true. While Mr Stokes rallies behind his investments in quoting
“only television has the grunt to drive business (Daily Telegraph)”
we interpret the mere announcement as a feather in our cap.
Consider online content and its management and think of these valuable attributes in the quest for more clients and better clients:
Speed and control
Our spine is made of journalism and Google mastership. The question you should ask of your own business is ‘would you rather buy space in someone else’s publication or would you rather market through your own?’
Modern marketing is exactly that – your very own organisation becomes its own publishing company through a long list of comms streams and you control absolutely everything you want to say and do to the market.
Price
No longer do you need to pay for expensive design, space bookings or other ‘real estate’ which made the Mad Men of the 1960s and 70s so wealthy. Those days are over. Better the revenue stays within your own business. You’ll need it as the leads come in!
Reach
If you want to reach a limited number of people as they flick the pages of a newspaper, then give your hard won money to the Mad Men. If you want to reach the entire world, do it through a content-based platform and, believe it or not, it will probably cost less than the old way.
If you want to pick your recipient groups specifically, there is only no more efficient and guaranteed way than to utilise databases and contacts and loop them into your creditable information feeds.
Permanence and legacy
Kerry Stokes and the Mad Men that feed from TV and newspaper advertising can offer an instant hit, but it will cost you and it won’t last long. Can your budget keep repeating this?
Go through content-driven web platforms and we see no reason why you can’t put your message across the entire world. What’s more, the exposure is enduring; it builds critical mass, leverages the exponential power of search engines, and maintains constant pull marketing and engagement directly through your business. It has a legacy that serves you for as long as you want it to.
Analytics and tracking
CAB reader audits have always been one of the more nebulous statistical bases of traditional media. But for a long time it was the only yardstick the media industry had.
While audits can make a reasonably accurate measure of reader numbers, they can never be properly proven and certainly struggle to show exactly who runs their eye over your marketing material.
Content-driven marketing, using all types of online proliferation tools and market engagement, actually can disclose accurate numbers and brings them into dialogue with yourself or your personnel.
For us, it’s a never-ending exercise in change, but the good news is that each time we discover a new way to manage your public relations and exposure it’s coming to you with more and more analytical disclosure and linking you to potential clients and investors in closer ways.
It’s very likely in your mind you have been comparing old style advertising with the open potential of a well managed digital platform.
We don’t deny it’s quite broad in many ways, so whatever intelligence you can gather is valuable.