Are you a hunter or a gatherer?

Inbound marketing lets you see your targets

Imagine you were alive a few thousand years ago. You’re family and tribe rely on you to put food on the table every week. You have a limited supply of weapons, namely arrows, that take a while to make and you can’t afford to waste them.

Would you stand at the edge of the forest, knowing that animals are in there, and fire your arrows randomly hoping to hit something?

Or would you position yourself near the watering hole, knowing that every day large numbers of the animals you need gather there? This would allow you to identify the best targets, and use something to lure them closer to you, thereby minimising your energy expenditure and preventing you from wasting your valuable arrows.

Obviously the second option is the smarter one. The only reason you’d aim fire randomly into the forest is if you weren’t aware of the watering hole. Isn’t it?

Now, lets jump forward to today…..

You run a business.

Your arrows are marketing dollars.

The forest is broadcast media.

Your target is customers.

The watering hole is the internet.

The lures are keyword search terms, websites and social media.

The only difference is that, unlike the poor animal, everyone’s a winner.

So the question is….when you market your business, are you a hunter or a gatherer?

Advertisers are now in charge

The traditional advertising model has relied on a few powerful broadcasters delivering their product (TV, radio, press etc) to the public for free (or close

Inbound marketing is like a customer magnet for business

to it) then charging companies a fee to advertise to this audience. And for a long time it has worked. Mass media was the easiest and most cost-effective way to reach a broad audience with your business’ message.

Then things started to change. The mass media has fragmented over the last 20 years. More magazines, more television channels, more radio choices and then the internet. No wonder so many advertisers are starting to question where they should place their marketing dollars.

The ever increasing speed of the internet is the final straw. Suddenly traditional media is being delivered online and the consumer is spending less time reading newspapers, listening to local radio and reading actual newspapers. Suddenly advertisers are in a real quandary about how to market themselves.

But the fact is, this changing media landscape is good news. The low cost of production, the massive migration to online media consumption and the creation of a “search economy” means that advertisers are now in charge.

Its just that they need to re-frame their thinking.

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Advertising has changed…forever

Josh Bernoff from Forrester Research has just posted a piece on AdAge discussing the latest findings of a survey taken in the USA with leading marketers. The results should be alarming for traditional advertising media and agencies.

It strongly echoes our observations here in Australia. I have written a series of posts in the last year pointing to the same conclusion: Advertising shift permanent, What will agencies do when everyone can bypass advertising?, Perfect storm causing traditional media bloodbath, The sound of a marketing revolution, and A turning point in marketing and media history?

Here is what Josh had to say:

In this recession, marketers have learned that interactive marketing is more effective, and advertising less effective, per dollar spent. While budgets for online have decreased, they decreased less than other budgets. Six out of ten marketers we surveyed agreed with the statement “we will increase budget for interactive by shifting money away from traditional marketing.” Only 7% said “we have no plans to increase our marketing budget.”

Unlike the last recession, digital marketing is no longer experimental. Now it looks more like advertising is inefficient, relative to digital. More than half of the marketers we surveyed said that effectiveness of direct mail, TV, magazines, outdoor, newspapers, and radio would stay the same or decrease within three years. In contrast, well over 70% expected the effectiveness of channels like created social media, online video, and mobile marketing to increase.

The result is that digital, which will be about 12% of overall advertising spend in 2009, is likely to grow to about 21% in five years. Along the way overall advertising budgets won’t grow much.

This is huge.

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SEO case-study: FREE comprehensive search engine optimisation for one lucky business

After 13 months of development, we are about to launch our ANLYZR Pro package to the business community. This is a comprehensive Search Engine Optimisation and Inbound Marketing Analytics package that delivers outstanding results.

We have been beta testing for the last 4 months and are happy to say the results have been fantastic. In fact, the results have been almost too good.

That could be because we’ve only been able to use the full ANLYZR Pro system on sites we have created, sites that we know have been built with search and inbound marketing in mind. These sites react exceptionally well to ANLYZR Pro’s analysis and recommendations.

So now we need to really challenge ANLYZR Pro by putting it to work on sites we haven’t built…..sites that perform badly in search….sites that have disappointed their owners.

Here’s your chance to receive over $12000 worth of analysis and recommendations for FREE.

Submit your site via the form below and we’ll select one site to participate in our case-study and receive the full ANLYZR Pro package for FREE. Any business site, large or small, can qualify.

The only thing we’ll ask in return is to be able to publish your site’s performance in a case-study and a testimonial once we’ve achieved the agreed goals.

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Sticky Inbound Marketing System v2.0 released

The latest version of our Sticky Inbound Marketing System has been written, tested and released to clients. The new version is a significant upgrade on the the original system, incorporating our latest knowledge and the completed Web ANLYZR reporting functions.

Sticky’s Inbound Marketing System is a total internet marketing system that helps your business get found online, attract new prospects and turn traffic into sales. Its like having another sales team.

The new system enables business owners and marketers to successfully compete online and grow their businesses implementing inbound marketing strategies whilst reducing some of their less effective marketing overheads.

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