Don’t Be A Broadcast Marketer (Part 2 of 2)

Published: July 1, 2013

By Jason Thibeault, Senior Director of Marketing Strategy, Limelight Networks

As discussed in Part 1 of this two-part essay, storytelling is reshaping marketing. Why? Because relationships are the new currency and you can’t build relationships through product messaging and bullet points. You need something more — like stories.

By Jason Thibeault, Senior Director of Marketing Strategy, Limelight Networks

As discussed in Part 1 of this two-part essay, storytelling is reshaping marketing. Why? Because relationships are the new currency and you can’t build relationships through product messaging and bullet points. You need something more — like stories.

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But telling stories isn’t enough. If you want to maximize the opportunity with your online audience, you also have to understand how relationships are changing. The buyer’s journey isn’t the same anymore. Thanks to digital, there are more steps and more places for you to get involved.

A Changing Set Of Needs

The best way to look at the way relationships are evolving as a result of digital is to think about a “hierarchy of needs.” The pyramid below reflects the psychological stages of a buyer’s journey that a customer might have gone through 10 years ago:

Jason1

So belying the fact that all marketing begins with need (perceived or influenced), in the past regime of broadcast messaging, tremendous focus was placed on awareness. Print ad. Radio ad. TV ad. It didn’t matter. And the more awareness the better because once consumers were aware (and that awareness matched to a need), consumers could focus on the messaging to see if the product or service met the need. Once a consumer was exposed to messaging (and focused on it) they determined the truth of it. This could have been a combination of activities, ranging from talking to friends to reading Consumer Reports, but once truth was established trust needed to be gained. Trust is largely dependent upon brand equity. It’s hard to trust brands that don’t have any mindshare, but easier to trust those that do. Because once trust has been established and the product or service determined to meet the underlying need, commitment happens — the user purchases (or scorns) the product.

But digital reshapes this. Take a look at the modified pyramid below.

Jason2

In the digital world of marketing, it’s not just about awareness once the need has been determined because the message is everywhere. No, it’s about relevancy. The consumer must feel like the message is targeted specifically at them, a feat only accomplished through digital technologies that allow the personalization of content and messaging through context (where is the user, what device are they using, what is their behavior history, what do they like). You can thank big (and getting bigger) data for that. Once a relevant message has been delivered, the consumer wants engagement. They head over to Facebook or Twitter to read and ask questions and to talk about feature specifications. And through that engagement, trust is developed. But in the digital world, because consumers are connected with so many other consumers instantaneously, trust has to be confirmed. So consumers engage with each other through those same channels with which they engaged with the company to determine if that trust is warranted. Is the brand reliable? Do they stand behind their product?

Everything in the digital world is transparent. But once trust has been confirmed, commitment to purchase (or scorn) the product is made. The middle three layers of this pyramid are where the meat is, where digital is having the most profound and underlying evolutionary change to marketing. Think about this from the consumer’s point of view:

  • If your message is more relevant, I’m more likely to engage with you around it (because I feel like it’s speaking to me).
  • If I’m engaging with you it’s because you are providing me relevant content which makes me want to trust you more.
  • If I trust you it’s because you are engaging with me and providing me relevant information.

Rethinking The Relationship Between Marketing And Pipeline

It goes without saying that there is a clear relationship between marketing and pipeline growth. That’s the first goal of marketing — to generate new sales. In many cases, those sales are not immediate. They are part of a “pipeline” through which further marketing and sales efforts can convert a prospect to a customer. But in the wake of how digital is evolving advertising (broadcast messaging) perhaps we need to look at pipeline differently? Perhaps there needs to be a more refined segmentation — short-term pipeline (there are always customers who have an accelerated time-to-decide), medium-term pipeline, and long-term pipeline. This segmentation would necessitate a grading system for engagement. So engagement that is closer to trust would be in the middle-pipeline, for example, while engagement that is further from trust (i.e., more toward awareness) would be in the long-term pipeline.

Regardless of how it’s accomplished, rethinking the way that we market to consumers necessitates rethinking how we represent success within the organization. We can’t continue to gauge the success of the new hierarchy of needs against previous broadcast-messaging expectations.

Marketers (And CEOs) Have To Change

If we are truly in a state of transition (from one hierarchy of needs to another) then everyone must change with it. Clearly the idea of just broadcasting a message out there, using digital channels to amplify it like never before, isn’t going to work. It doesn’t even get past the second step — relevant — in the new pyramid of consumer needs. And so everything that follows will be a colossal failure. Marketers must get out of the idea that they have to broadcast their message to as many places as possible and focus on cultivating engagement because it is through that engagement that they will generate long-term relationships and revenue. And along with that realization, the very messages themselves have to change to stories—narrative-based, character-driven, conflict filled stories about their customers.

But for that to happen, CEOs and business leaders must also change the way they think — that all marketing activity relates to immediate pipeline generation and sales. They must think about how marketing activities generate long-term opportunities for incremental and related sales through relationship building…not just short-term revenue.

The new way to do marketing — engaging with an audience through stories — is here. Successful companies are already adopting it (see what Coca-Cola did to its corporate web site). But don’t worry. It’s not changing over night. It’s a subtle shift brought about by the digital world. Only don’t wait to change the way you approach digital marketing. Subtle or not, it’s happening and before you know it your audience may be ignoring your messages, your strategy, and your brand.

Jason Thibeault is Senior Director of Marketing Strategy for Limelight Networks, a provider of cloud-based SaaS applications for digital presence management.

Posted in: Demanding Views

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