It’s Noisy Out There – The Marcom Dilemma
Marketing and communications has always been a fascination for me and I have done my stint as a VP of marketing – a role I thoroughly enjoyed. That was now many years ago and this morning, I have been wondering about marcom now. Things have changed with social media and the vast array of competing messages. For me, twitter sort of sums up my feeling that marcom is becoming a game of sitting atop a mountain shouting soundbites as loud and as often as possible in an indiscriminate manner! All very well except that every man, woman and dog is also doing the same thing. Add into the mix the EU legislation around privacy in the form of GDPR, under which you essentially lose the easy ability to use email as a marcom tool, and you start to wonder just how to get a message out at all?
Whenever I am asked about go to market strategy, I find myself telling the same story. Years ago, when I visited Europe from the US, I kept seeing billboards and signs on park benches – almost everywhere for something called ‘ING’. I’d never heard of ING at that time and was clueless as to what ING was. As I tell people, I didn’t really even register the orange ING signs for a while – they were just there and at some point, I became consciously aware of them. Even then, I did nothing except ponder just who ING could be? It took several more run ins with ING signs before I took the step to find out what and who ING might be. The moral of the story is that in marcom, you have to project a consistent brand or message for a long time across a lot of different channels before anyone even notices. Even when they do notice, it takes a lot more for that person to take action.
Today, the standard tools of pushing that brand or message are press announcements, social media, advertising – mainly internet-based and word of mouth. Yes, you can do webinars, events and so on, but they need promoting too if you are to reach an audience. Forget the old mail shot – either snail mail or email. Snail mail barely gets looked at unless it is very clever and email is about to be removed as a tool to a large degree too. Yet, post something on Linkedin, for example, and it is immediately drowned by a thousand other competing soundbites. Even that also requires that you have a network of followers.
As I sit pondering how to promote this website to a broader, richer audience (something I do a lot despite the fact that we have good reach), it seems to me to come down to the following;
- Content – good, exclusive, thoughtful content is the primary key to success,
- Call to action – what do I want people to do when they finally react to my marcom messaging? how will it benefit them? why is it worth their valuable time to consume the information provided?
- Consistent messaging across a wide range of different channels including press announcements, social media platforms, emails to existing subscribers and clients, potentially other means like webinars, video, podcasts, trade show presence, events,
- Network – getting people to like, share and co-promote on your behalf – word of mouth is powerful
While this approach can provide success, it takes time and effort and if I may say so , a little luck.
Increasingly, we compete with not just our competitors, but with everyone in the market, for that conscious awareness and then action. The background noise is constantly increasing in volume and our target audience is increasingly weary of the noise. So, if we want to be heard, we better be saying something worthwhile.
Keep in touch and sign up to our Newsletter
