Where Is ALL Marketing Heading? Online, That’s Where

I mean like WTF, my head is spinning from the onslaught of change and innovation. Where is marketing heading? All communication and entertainment is heading online. The print media, books, newspapers and magazines – online. Voice conversations, the humble phone call is now happening online. TV and movies are now all online. Music is now downloadable from where? You guessed it, on f*****g line and so is marketing, that’s where.

Personally I am fascinated by what has happened over the last 25+ years, the digital age. When I read about, online, all the change that has taken place and what is coming down the track, I am so excited, I keep reading and wanting to understand and learn about this new digital world. Why fight it, sure you can opt out and that is every persons right, but is it a companies right to opt out?

Are the C-Suite executives unable to comprehend the obvious business benefits that online marketing brings. Now let’s be honest I think the Muppet’s that post about what they had for breakfast have given the business world a big stick, to justify their claims that online, particularly Social Platforms, are frivolous, but are they?

Dion Hinchcliffe is a blogger I read and admire, yesterday I found a post of his that made a lot of sense to me personally and should have the attention of every C-Suite executive and marketing person in the world that is not convinced by the online marketing argument. I will paraphrase Dion a bit in my attempt to explain what it is he said in the post so that you understand why it caught my attention.

What online marketing brings to business

The old communications model, so called legacy channels. They are the old communication model for advertising and promoting business. Newspapers, Radio, TV, magazines, flyers, and so on… These legacy channels have a very limited reach, fine for a small or family business, but for a large business with international markets, pretty useless penetration.

This is how Dion broke the legacy channels down.

• One-to-some – low scale, meaning that the numbers of people you could reach using these channels is very low
• Closed Participation – low network effect, these channels are mostly for broadcasting your message
• Low Simultaneity – inefficient, not possible to target your known market effectively
• Low Visibility – hard to re-use, limited value
• Difficult to analyse – poor insight, my personal favourite, it is very difficult to know who has seen your advertising, is new business coming because of a new advertising campaign they have seen or not?

By contrast let’s now look at the Social Channels.

• One-to-any – high scale, these channels allow international penetration from the word go
• Open participation – high network effect, the ability to network your message has never being easier
• High simultaneity – efficient, all your campaigns can be as targeted in many ways to suit your market
• High visibility – easier to reuse, shared value, social conversations are visible to all
• Possible to analyze – great insights, you can have metrics coming out your ying/yang

The last 6/7 years have seen the online communication platforms pass out all the legacy channels and the last 3/4 years have seen that development escalate with the growth of social platforms, but these are still not complete, nor has the digital development peaked. We have seen all the legacy channels migrate to the online space, all that I mentioned in the opening paragraph are now heavily dependent on the online space due to the ease of use of the online technology.

In conclusion

Get with the friggin’ programme, my words not Dion’s. For high scale, networking, efficiency, low cost, innovative and great insights (analytics) there is nothing to beat online marketing for your business or organisation, what’s not to like?

Can your company afford to get left behind?

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