It’s time we sound the death knell for the concept of “website” and embrace the concept of “sites on the web.”
Long gone are the days when an effective approach to marketing online involved simply having a website—regardless of how engaging, informative or (insert adjective of choice here) it was—and just ensuring your site ranked well in Google. To be effective in today’s buyer-centric economy, we need to be attuned to the multi-modal, multi-channel experience of buyers.
Orchestrate the overall experience
The effective marketer approaches marketing online as being about orchestrating an ecosystem of communication modes and channels that together result in an overall experience for the primary buyer. Naturally, this is an approach reliant heavily on inbound marketing.
In such an ecosystem, like the general one below, the brand/product/corporate website (www.brand.com) is best thought of as a central element that anchors an overall buying experience that, usually, starts somewhere else.
That “somewhere else” depends largely on buyers’ behaviors and habits when it comes to finding information and products/services online. As a result, the effective marketer looks to understand how to get found and then formulates an engagement strategy upon that foundational insight into buyer behaviors and habits.
There’s no single engagement strategy that fits all marketing challenges
We need to carefully orchestrate a selection of tactics and channels from the plethora of options such as Facebook, Twitter, SlideShare, Google, Bing, YouTube, blogs, online publications, etc. What is certain is that just building a website is no longer sufficient in and of itself to maximize your online brand building efforts—and to convert interest in your brand into buying.
The effective marketer now thinks in terms of systems and ecosystems rather than an independent site. Yes, complexity has increased due to the fragmentation of channels, buyer behaviours and attention, but so has your opportunity for really connecting with prospective buyers and making meaning in the places where they are most likely to encounter your brand.
How are you engaging across the web? Or do you have a different perspective entirely? Jump in and share your ideas.
Great article Tony. I too, believe just having a company website is no longer enough to get noticed by consumers. I view the sites on the web that my company uses, Twitter, LinkedIN, Facebook, and myBrainshark as extensions of my company’s website because, ultimately we are responsible for our part of the content on those sites. Together, they create a kind of net to catch prospects and direct them to where we want them to go.
However, I don’t know if inbound marketing is an entirely new phenomenon. If we look at the past tactics of marketing my company has used (for reference we are a smaller company of approximately 68 people) print, telephone pages, flyers etc they served the purpose of driving people to our doors or to call our number. Twitter, Facebook, youTube are used to drive people to our website, or to call, or to our doors. Marketing, whether it is traditional marketing, permission marketing, inbound marketing, or whatever unique term someone wants to coin, is still required to do one thing; get customers to contact you. The key differences between traditional marketing and the new social media are the two way communication that buyers now demand, and the power of consumer reviews.
Customers today are more inclined to require more information about a company and they’re more inclined to get reviews from other people who have used a company’s product or service before purchasing. For a company to operate in this environment it becomes very important to have a strategy, as you advise Tony. What may work for youTube may not work for myBrainshark and vice versa. And for a smaller company like the one I work for we’ve opted to focus on a few social media sites and really flesh out our presence there as opposed to trying to be in all places and be all things to all people.
Thanks for the blog article!
Sincerely,
Albert Schmidt
Albert,
Thanks for your follow-up and commentary. Your organization sounds like it has made solid strides in embracing both the complexity and the power of the social web.
I appreciate the comment about ‘inbound marketing’; it is, as you point out, perhaps a term that has been refreshed from a prior connotation. Prior to the advent of the web, there was certainly a central experience portal in place–it might have been a bricks and mortar store or a 1.800 number or an office building, etc.
What occurs to me is that, in that prior reality, we asked buyers to jump from experiencing an advertisement (e.g. print, TV, billboard, radio) or receiving a direct mail piece or being at some marketing/sales event to going direct to the more physical experience of engaging with a salesperson; there weren’t really many intermediary steps, save for perhaps conversing with a neighbour, family member or friend, where buyers could gradually develop preference for a particular brand/product/service.
What the introduction of ‘sites on the web’ has done is create more opportunities for supporting buyers in their buying journey pre-engagement with the actual manufacturer/service provider, lessening the commitment required to learn about and develop preference for a brand/product/service. Yes, it’s a more complex ecosystem, requiring more effective strategies and care on the part of marketers, but it also offers great opportunity for those marketers to be sherpas along the buying journey.
Overall, we’re really enthusiastic about all the opportunities available to our clients to use owned, earned–and when appropriate, rented–media to build their brand with potential buyers.
It is, as you point out, about focusing. I’m interested, how is it your firm determines what to focus on vs. what not to?
It’s not so much a question of what ‘not’ to do, but rather what fits best for us at this time. To know what strategies fit best for a company that company must know what its goals are in constructing its web presence. Is the goal to be recognized, to be found, to generate leads, or to allow for dialogue with the consumer? Is the company looking to reach a wide geographical area, or is it like my firm, where we want to focus on a municipality or specific region?
For us, because our marketing budget is rather limited, we’ve opted to dip a toe into the social media/online marketing pool. We’ve started with myBrainshark as an easy way to enhance our website. We’ve jumped onto Twitter to begin getting our brand out. And we’ve launched our Facebook page to indulge in dialogue with prospects and clients alike. In future we hope to incorporate LinkedIN and other social media sites. While this approach may be slow, we want to learn at each step. Once our comfort level for a particular medium is sound we can expand and include more Sites on the Web and see how each site interacts with the others.
Understanding each site and knowing its strengths and weaknesses before incorporating another site is a key strategy. That knowledge allows us to effectively use the tools and, hopefully, avoid pitfalls. As well, if a particular site doesn’t work for us we can always limit or shut down or presence there. Technology changes are rapid and we don’t necessarily want all of our online marketing eggs in one basket.
We chose the sites we did because they are well known (Twitter and Facebook) and have a rather large following. As we find other sites we will evaluate them using our goals as a litmus test and incorporate them if appropriate. Expanding too fast and not being able to adequately track results or failing to reply to consumers in a timely fashion through these sites hurts the brand more than helps.
Marketing online is like a virtual baby. If you don’t feed it and keep track of its vitals it will wither.
Sincerely,
Albert Schmidt
Maybe I should have said flower instead of baby…
However, I don’t know if inbound marketing is an entirely new phenomenon. If we look at the past tactics of marketing my company has used (for reference we are a smaller company of approximately 68 people) print, telephone pages, flyers etc they served the purpose of driving people to our doors or to call our number. Twitter, Facebook, youTube are used to drive people to our website, or to call, or to our doors. Marketing, whether it is traditional marketing, permission marketing, inbound marketing, or whatever unique term someone wants to coin, is still required to do one thing; get customers to contact you. The key differences between traditional marketing and the new social media are the two way communication that buyers now demand, and the power of consumer reviews.
A simple but productively disruptive point — nice one. Separating ‘web’ from ‘sites’ can nudge people to understand all at once how they need to shift their strategic thinking. It’s been a long time since the web functioned as a channel (rather than the engine for the channels), but our everyday vocab hasn’t really adjusted to the progression.