Solicitation is officially dead for the modern marketer!
In this new world where we strive and work hard towards being relevant, it is hard to put ourselves in a position where we have to ‘beg for attention’. In the traditional world where everyone had few options we would always win our audience by increasing our #ShareOfVoice in any given media. For instance if the audience changed channels while our advertisement was playing we could simply increase the advertisements to be present on all channels. However today they would just turn off their television and download their visual entertainment! The options have increased, the attention span has reduced and the inertia has slowed any response to procrastination.
Try it!
Take a newspaper and scream the latest #news on the sidewalk and see if anyone cares? You might have a taxi driver stop by and tell you that he just read that news on his mobile phone! OR you might have an old gentlemen ask you to bring your voice down cause there is so much of latest news these days that even the headliners are confused!
So you think you are part of the new age digital marketing industry?
How many ads do you notice online in a day? How many of them do you read and click through? Fewer…. Now, how many of the products do you remember? Digital marketing was a replacement for Lester Wunderman’s direct marketing but has outgrown its own options! If we are to engage and interact with our potential customers we must speak to them as equals and not as a vendor of paid goods!!
A new era for Digital Marketing – INBOUND MARKETING
There is more work involved, now don’t run away! it diminishes as you work harder towards it. Inbound marketing refers to pertinence of content in the right place and that precise moment that a potential audience is looking for it. For example if you were looking for Inbound Marketing, you would turn first to Google who would show you that this was a brain child of Hubspot in USA. The keywords and SEO work has been a constant effort of hubspot since 2006 which has rewarded them with fine timing on Google. You might argue that advertising is based more on a departmental concept rather than a rice shopping mission. Then again, say we were reading an article on the plummeting gold prices in the US and found a link to a podcast from a veteran consultant of the BFSI sector who spoke about how one should invest in gold in India as it is still a good hedge for inflation here. The veteran just happened to be from ABC bank which becomes your first logical choice for the investment! Hence inbound marketing can work in several scenarios as it follows the directive of feeding on customer interest. Its like a pied piper who makes consumers who find certain information relevant follow the information to your house where you can discuss your brand values over a soft one way conversation and yet get solicited response!
The question now really is whether you want to beg for leads or work towards having them come over to you? Digicat is going inbound from this day on which means a lot of hard work, losing some clients and work force but we believe this is the future trend.
This blog was originally posted on digicat blog
Jitendra Gursingh
Hi Pawan,
I agree with you that Inbound Marketing is the future. Hubspot has started the trend and so did one of the most popular SEO Resource, SEOMOZ.com which now calls itself a Search & Inbound Marketing company.
Inbound is more about giving a cold shoulder to cold calls, prospecting unknown customers and the likes. It talks about understanding your target customer and then directing all your efforts in attracting him through a funnel with helpful resources.
All the best for this direction. It is a dramatic shift in mindset & not the easiest to execute, but a step in that direction is great! It would be great if we could have a affordable solution partner in India for implementing Inbound, but for now we shall have to depend on various specialist tools and co-ordinate them to develop a proper Inbound solution for clients. The Hubspot platform does this amazingly well but it is TOOO expensive for Indian companies and as investment for your own agency.
PS: No Inbound Marketing firm offers their platform for less than 6 months – 1 year. Make sure you keep this time factor in mind as achieving / measuring results from Inbound efforts take quite sometime.
Pawan Deokule
Jitendra, Thanks for seconding the thought of inbound marketing.
It has always been an endeavor in my life to stick with the emerging trend rather than the trendy.
I began my career in direct marketing where a funnel approach with customized solutions was the ideal theory and that thankfully has not changed. In fact, with our fast paced dynamic world, it only seems closer!
Building tools for inbound marketing can only be feasible once inbound marketing itself achieves critical mass. However, your note on the time line makes sense in India today because digital marketers have sold analytics more than marketing in this industry. This whole ‘sell by numbers pitch’ has misplaced itself from some Finance theorist’s rough paper!
At digicat we convince clients for marketing campaigns that can get them future business instead of present numbers and we have always performed better on branding campaigns that pure play lead generation!