Post-Consumerist America Experiences Growing Pains In Push To Pull Market
Thefuture of marketing is here. The shift from push to pull marketing is creating both challenges and opportunities to engage consumers in new ways—and to develop profitable relationships with them.
Consumers are in control. And this trend is only going to continue as they spend more time online. They’re getting hands-on with brands: creating videos , watching what others have made, sharing photo sets, joining social networks, subscribing to (and delivering) RSS feeds, and taking their media with them in their mobile players. They’re also personalizing the way they shop, interact, watch, listen, communicate and buy.
The bottom-line is that organizations no longer have the tight control over their message as they once did, but they have new opportunities to build long-term customer engagement. In my previous role at Coca-Cola Company, where I led the Worldwide Interactive Marketing Organization, I was a part of this shift every day. When we launched the new Coca-Cola brand site in July 2006, it differentiated Coca-Cola from traditional company sites because it consisted primarily of user-generated content. And we used marketing analytics to make sure we were hitting our business objectives.
Advertising in Web 2.0 technologies and user-generated content can be an effective way to make lasting consumer connections. What do we mean by Web 2.0? Streaming media, mobile media, podcasts, Rich Internet Applications (RIA), and syndication technologies like Really Simple Syndication (RSS). And consumer-generated content can take a variety of forms: video, photos, comment boards, product reviews, and more.
All of these have the potential to hook your audience—and to keep them coming back. But in order to make sure your marketing strategies are really turning occasional visitors into long-time customers—and hopefully, brand evangelists—you need to move beyond a tactical view of campaign performance and attain true customer-centric insight.
Companies like Microsoft, Kimberly-Clark, Orbitz, Kettle Foods, and many others are using marketing analytics to understand the effectiveness of Web 2.0 campaigns and to better connect with their consumers. And there’s never been a better opportunity to form lasting connections with consumers, breaking through the clutter, reaching them when and where they want to be reached, on their terms, and in relevant, targeted ways.
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