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Posts tagged ‘traditional advertising’

31
Jul

The Necessary Evil of Advertising in B2B: A Contradictory Experiment.

1920 Experiment : Karl Krall (on the right) tried to detect the thinking radiation he assumed to flow between the dog and the human. (source: http://www.weirdexperiments.com)

1920 Experiment : Karl Krall (on the right) tried to detect the thinking radiation he assumed to flow between the dog and the human. (source: http://www.weirdexperiments.com)

This isn’t a blog post about how good content marketing is, and that you should stop advertising. Quite the contrary.

Allow me to explain: advertising had been shifting to online. It’s been shifting online for a while now. The most obvious reason for that is that people spend more time online. However, B2B marketers out there know that click-through rates are terrible. Leaderboard banners, skyscrapers, and what-ever-they-look-like-banners, get click-through rates below 1%.

And still online advertising seems to be growing, according to Google. There must be people who can explain that contradiction. I can’t.

Whatever.

It’s clear that online advertising just doesn’t work. Ask anyone you know which on-line ad they still remember, while we all spend hours per day online. The answer will be zero.

But let me tell you why B2B marketers still need to keep on advertising, on- and off-line… Read more »

24
Apr

CEO’s Agree: Marketers don’t show Marketing ROI. How to regain trust?

 

blind for marketing ROI

Are we blind for our own Marketing ROI?
(image source: lifehacker.com)

Showing Marketing ROI and the ability to contribute to the growth of the business is in many ways the biggest challenge of every marketer.

Every so often reports show that B2B marketers have problems showing Marketing ROI. And then marketers have to do ‘more with less’.

 

Why is this? 

Why do we have problems in showing our Marketing ROI? What can we do to regain trust from our CEO?

Read more »

16
Oct

5 Dangerous Threats to Your Content Marketing Success

Source : Flickr, by papilly

Lately there has been a lot of attention going to Content Marketing. Although it’s one of my favorite subjects, blindly going for a content marketing strategy can be dangerous.

Forgetting the core reason for a content marketing strategy

When developing your content marketing strategy, you start developing a process to position content along the buying cycle, or even better: along the complete customer life cycle.

Every piece of content needs to drive the buyer further down the buying cycle, or increase the satisfaction level of existing customers. Having a good content creation process that inherently has checks built-in to make sure the right Call-To-Action (CTA) is assigned to each piece of content.

These CTA’s are developed to progress your buyer through the buying cycle. Marketing automation techniques like the ones I described in this post can be used to automate some of your work.

So when implementing content marketing: don’t forget what you want to do with your content. In the end, you are doing this to do business!

Read more »

3
Apr

If advertising is ineffective, how do I reach my buyers?

Photo by srboisvert via Flickr Creative Commons

This post is about how traditional advertising has become ineffective in B2B and social media marketing is no answer to this problem. But there is a solution.

What does advertising mean in your life? Do you read industry magazines in which B2B companies advertise? Probably. Usually I flip through them, scan for titles and interesting images that link back to our business, and occasionally I will read an article.

How many times did you notice the advertisements? And I am not talking about us marketing people, who are naturally inclined to pay attention to advertisements, but put yourself in the shoes of your buyers.

Maybe your buyers are not paying attention to your advertisements because they are boring, but that’s another story ;-)

Traditional advertising has become ineffective

It might seem that I am the advocate to stop all our advertisement efforts. Now that is for sure not the case: advertising still has its place to put out important news, and reflect our brand in general. People still see these advertisements, consciously or subconsciously. And as with everything, they cannot “not” be influenced by it, so in that sense it does have its purpose.

But traditional advertising is generally so wide that it has become increasingly ineffective.  And I do not distinguish between on or offline advertising.

One-way interruption marketing has become ineffective because everybody is “over advertised”: you receive 1000’s of advertising per day (!) trying to interrupt you. Just to give you an idea: in 1971 the average American was exposed to 560 advertising messages per day. By 1997, that number had increased to more than 3.000 per day. In 2009, it was more than 13.000 per day. And in 2012 you can bet it will be many more than that.

So in effect, people become agnostic to advertising. Just think about it: on signs along your way to work, in supermarkets, in elevators, even in toilets. Because it is just too much, it has become noise.

Read more »