With Google posting its strongest quarterly profit ever ($1.6b) and tech companies such as IBM following suit, the recovery is well and truly under way. Or is it? It is. Almost. Well…kinda. Not in marketing departments. Yet. I have spoken to a number of senior marketers over the past weeks and not only are they having to fight for money, but they’re being given their shredded budgets in the quarter they’re supposed to execute programs in. Yeah – that’ll help the ROI!!! And, as opportunistic as ever and well ahead of the marketing budget recovery curve, the same old vendors are busy repackaging the same old offers with a nice new ‘post recession’ bow on top. Some more subtle than others. On this occasion (and surprisingly), subtleness was brought to us courtesy of an agency! I know – hard to fathom, but true. Michael Gale from Strategic Oxygen was on form as he shared his vision of the new audience and content centric marketing landscape. I did laugh out loud when I realized that his proposed best practices may require regional/field, product and corporate marketing departments to actually TALK to each other – and align their activities. That was funny. I mean seriously – as if the recession has really changed anyone. Bankers are back on unexplainable bonuses – if THAT hasn’t changed, I very much doubt marketing divisions will start group hugging.
Anyway – what I did take away from his lively presentation were some useful reminders for all of us (supported by good data from thousands of interviews). The right content at the right time in the right place matters. A lot. Sounds blatantly obvious, but it’s not. It’s also not bloody easy when the ‘right place’ can be hundreds of places – this whole 2.0 explosion thing really hasn’t helped marketers with the old targeting challenge. Before you had a handful of communities with 10s or 100s of thousands of targeted professionals – now you have 10s or 100s of communities with your target audiences scattered all over the place. GREAT! Seriously though – how do you figure out where in this new landscape your audience spends their time during the awareness, consideration and purchase phases??? And even once you’ve figured that out – what about age? Appearently, the younger your target audience is, the more they consume. And as a result of that, boomers, cuspers and generation y have completely different content consumption preferences at the various stages of the purchasing life cycle. Oh yeah, and then there is the cultural nuances around various geographies…
Sounds like a lot to do with limited resource right? Wrong. In the same way that 2.0 has turned traditional content consumption rules on their heads, you can turn traditional marketing rules on their heads. This is not about customized content for each medium and individual, adapted by age and geo. It is about realizing and accepting that you’ve officially lost all control. You can’t possibly know who wants what, where and when. Empower your buyers with ALL the assets and THEY will chose WHAT they want, WHEN they want it, WHERE they want it. In my humble opinion, you as the marketer will – in turn – need to be empowered by some seriously fresh 2.0 marketing tools and partners to travel this journey with you. Let’s hope that they will provide YOU with the right content at the right time, in the right place. Peace out.
