Online marketing appears to be making another rapid and significant shift.
With the growth of social media some marketers are realizing that you cannot expect consumers to seek them out. And, efforts to drive traffic to marketing microsites is getting expensive and challenging.
Carol Kruse, vp of global interactive marketing for Cocoa-Cola put it this way. We really believe in fishing where the fish are. The old model is to build your own site and spend media dollars to bring them there.
Coke’ Sprite brand recently went fishing where the fish are. They launched Sprite Sips on Facebook with its 100 million unique visitors. On their page, Sprite uses a customizable animated character to engage potential customers in a whole host of social media and social networking activities. The goal, gain influence and advocacy.
As recently as the October Online Marketing World conference, Campaign Microsites were a hot topic of discussion amongst online marketers.
Microsites like the highly successful site www.elfyourself.com by OfficeMax try to go viral and generate a large number of leads. The original version of elfyourself generated over 36 million of them. While this is impressive it still leaves OfficeMax with the challenge of converting leads to sales.
While not everyone is abandoning the microsite campaign model I do think we are seeing a shift from a focus on marketing products to marketing to customers.
John
As you rightly point out, games, sweepstakes and the like are now established ways to collect lists of customer names for outbound marketing. But are they leads? I don’t think so. They are just a list, a long list, of people who participated in the game and who will probably start getting mails from Office Max as the quid pro quo for having had a bit of fun. Some of them will go on to buy from Ofice Max, the marketer will achieve their campaign ROI and everyone will be happy.
You could just as easily substitute Office Max with Jiffy Lube, McDonalds, even Durex and it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference, except that poor McDonalds would have been pilloried for manipulative youth marketing.
Is this what marketing has come to?
Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant
Interim CRM Manager