Driving Attention
The era of interruption based marketing has passed
Creating interest, awareness, and ultimately adoption before someone even knows they want your product or service is the new marketing process. The idea of making your audience stop, look, and listen to your pitch in this day-and-age is almost laughable. Customers are busy, they’re on compressed schedules, and they’re pulled in many different directions. So if you want to interrupt them and demand they pay attention to your pitch in order for them to buy it? Just doesn’t work, and worse it means that you’re already starting out with a mark against you and that is hard to recover from. New marketers know that putting content out for a potential customer to find is the way to go since it will ultimately bring them back to your site and convert them into a sale.
Content Marketing is about curating a desire, allowing the customer time to adopt, and then become a brand champion.
Think how you go about buying any major product now-a-days. Here’s the steps:
- You identify the item on the internet
- Find the different brands for the item through a search
- Locate the stores where they’re sold through a search
- Read the spec’s on the item via store pages or the manufacturers web site
- Digest the reviews and take note of the ratings
- Talk to your friends who own one of them via social media
- Compare price points on a SERP
- Narrow the list and… Tah-dah! You buy the item.
All of which can be done ins the space of a few hours facilitated by browsers, blogs, social, and microsites… AKA Content Marketing.
Interruption based marketing is about brutal time sapping rudeness that eventually wears the viewer down and sometimes they buy the brand and not know why. Content Marketing is about curating a desire, allowing the customer time to adopt, and then become a brand champion.
I firmly believe in this new approach, in my opinion print is only for very specific situations and will in a very short period of time vanish.