Reach Machines » Does Your Marketing and Ad Strategy Have a Value Proposition?

August 11, 2008

Does Your Marketing and Ad Strategy Have a Value Proposition?

Filed under: UI/UX, Uncategorized, advertising, creative, entertainment, marketing strategy, social media — bstraley @ 11:58 am

This article in Brandweek about widgets got me thinking. As the Web offers an increasingly two-way user experience and enables people to discover and amplify content and messages at virtually zero cost, we in the online marketing and advertising professions have to shift our thoughts and actions away from “capturing” eyeballs to “attracting” them.

In practical terms, this means your online marketing programs need to be built around a core value proposition. It’s no longer enough to develop creative ways to “sell” an audience on the value proposition of the product/service we’re promoting. Today, the most successful online marketing programs are the ones that create value themselves which is accretive to the business’s overall marketing performance.

Take search marketing for example. One way to approach the planning and execution of an SEM program is to “carpet bomb” Google et al with text ads and wait and watch to see what pulls. What you will no doubt discover in the process is that the most effective pairings of keyword (ie “customer intention”) with a message relevant to the need signaled by the keyword will perform the best. That’s a simple instance of the online marketer creating value for a consumer. The user asks Google for help finding a solution to her problem and the online marketer raises her hand to help the user out. Think of it as pre-sales support.

What makes search such a perfect medium for the value creation model of online marketing is much less straightforward from other types of content on the Web. How can display advertising be seen as value creating when they’re generally in the way and/or noise that’s easily tuned out by the visitor to a site? Unlike search where the act of searching qualifies the user for certain types of targeted messages, content sites have to rely upon ad platforms to deliver “relevant” ads. The challenge in this case is to deliver an ad that creates value when the visitor’s intent when landing on the page was to read something, watch a video, catch up with a friend, etc. Except at the margins, it doesn’t really matter what the age, gender, location, income, etc. of the visitor is on most content sites because they have a choice and they choose to not notice ads let alone click on them. A contextually irrelevant banner ad doesn’t create much value and the landing page sitting on the other side of that display ad almost never creates any value.

So what’s an online marketer do beyond ensure her site’s optimized for natural search discovery and creating incremental value for consumers through a savvy search campaign? Find ways of producing content and experiences that:

create value for the target market
deliver messages that are aligned with the brand’s value proposition

In future posts, I’ll identify a few terrific examples of how this can work using some combination of videos, games, and offers. For starters, check out a brilliant viral online marketing campaign gets done.

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