The New Rules of Marketing and PR. David Meerman Scott
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kicking the virtual tires. These sites and most others assume that I’m ready to buy a car right now. But I actually just wanted to learn something. Sure, I got graphics and animation, TV commercials, pretty pictures, and low financing offers on these sites, but little else.
I looked around for some personality on these sites and didn’t find much, because the automaker websites portray their organizations as nameless, faceless corporations. In fact, the sites I looked at are so similar that they’re effectively interchangeable. At each site, I felt as if I was being marketed to with a string of messages that had been developed in a lab or via focus groups. It just didn’t feel authentic. If I wanted to see car TV ads, I would have flipped on the TV. I was struck with the odd feeling that all large automakers’ sites were designed and built by the same Madison Avenue ad guy. These sites were advertising to me, not building a relationship with me. They were luring me in with one-way messages, not educating me about the companies’ products. Guess what? When I arrive at a site, you don’t need to grab my attention; you already have it!
Automakers have become addicted to the crack cocaine of marketing: big-budget TV commercials and other offline advertising. Everywhere I turn, I see automobile ads that make me think, “This has got to be really freakin’ expensive.” The television commercials, the “sponsored by” stuff, the sales “events,” and other high-ticket Madison Avenue marketing might make you feel good, but is it effective?
These days, when people are thinking of buying a car (or any other product or service), they usually go to the web first. Even my 85-year-old mother does it! When people come to you online, they are not looking for TV commercials. They are looking for information to help them make a decision.
Here’s the good news: I did find some terrific places on the web to learn about cars. Unfortunately, the places where I got authentic content and where I became educated and where I interacted with humans weren’t part of the automakers’ sites. Edmunds Forums3 is a free, consumer-driven, social networking and personal pages site. It features photo albums, user groups based on make and model of car, and favorite links. The site was excellent in helping me narrow down choices. For example, in the forums, I could read hundreds of messages about each car I was considering. I could see pages where owners showed off their vehicles. This is where I was making my decision, dozens of clicks removed from the big automaker sites.
Since I first wrote about automaker sites on my blog, hundreds of people have jumped in to comment or email me with similar car-shopping experiences and frustrations with automaker websites. And while I certainly recognize that the automakers have improved their sites since I first wrote about them, the focus is still on advertising. Something is seriously broken in the automobile business if so many people tell me they are unable to find, directly on a company site, the information they need to make a purchase decision.
But it’s not just automakers.
Think about your own buying habits. Do you make purchase decisions based on your independent research, via information you find with search engines like Google? Of course you do! Do you contact your friends and colleagues via social media like Facebook and ask them about products and services you’re interested in? If so, you are not alone. And yet many sellers fail to reach you in this process.
In the years before she headed to college, my daughter researched appropriate schools by searching online and connecting with her friends. Over the course of her high school years, she carefully narrowed her choices down to a handful of schools that were a good fit for her. When applications were due, she was all set.
Yet in the months leading up to the application deadline, she received hundreds of very expensive direct-mail packages from universities around the world. Many sent large, thick envelopes containing glossy brochures with hundreds of pages. These efforts were completely wasted, because my daughter had already made up her mind by doing her own research on the web. This huge investment in direct-mail advertising simply didn’t work.
Before the web, organizations had only two significant options for attracting attention: Buy expensive advertising or get third-party ink from the media. But the web has changed the rules. The web is not TV. Organizations that understand the New Rules of Marketing and PR develop relationships directly with consumers like you and me.
I’d like to pause here a moment for a clarification. When I talk about the new rules and compare them to the old rules, I don’t mean to suggest that all organizations should immediately drop their existing marketing and PR programs and use this book’s ideas exclusively. Moreover, I’m not of the belief that the only marketing worth doing is on the web. If your newspaper advertisements, telephone directory listings, media outreach, and other programs are working for you, that’s great! Please keep going. There is room in many marketing and PR programs for traditional techniques.
That being said, there’s no doubt that today people solve problems by turning to the web. I’m sure you do too. Just reflect on your own habits as you contemplate a purchase.
Consider another form of marketing, the art of finding a new job. Several times per month, I receive email or phone calls from people who are searching for work. They usually send their resume (CV) to me and want to network with me to find a job. What these people are doing is advertising a product (their labor) by sending me an unsolicited email message. Like the auto companies and the universities, the typical job seeker is advertising a product. Yet the vast majority of these people are not positioning themselves to be found on the web, because they don’t have a personal website, they aren’t blogging or creating online videos, and, except for maybe a Facebook or LinkedIn profile, they aren’t active in social networking. They are not creating the content that will help an employer to find them when a company needs new staff.
If you aren’t present and engaged in the places and at the times that your buyers are, then you’re losing out on potential business—no matter whether you’re looking for a job or marketing your company’s product or your organization’s service. Worse, if you are trying to apply the game plan that works in your mainstream-media-based advertising and public relations (PR) programs to your online efforts, you will not be successful.
So take a minute to ask yourself this simple question: How are my existing advertising and media relations programs working?
Advertising: A Money Pit of Wasted Resources
In the old days, traditional, nontargeted advertising via newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and direct mail was the only way to go. But these media make it very difficult to target specific buyers with individualized content. Yes, advertising is still used for megabrands with broad reach and probably still works for some organizations and products (though not as well as before). Guys watching football on TV drink a lot of beer, so perhaps it makes sense for mass marketer Budweiser to advertise on NFL broadcasts (but not for small microbrews that appeal to a small niche customer base to do so). Advertising also works in many trade publications. If your company makes deck sealant, then you probably want to advertise in Professional Deck Builder magazine to reach your buyers (but that won’t allow you to reach the do-it-yourself market). If you run a local real estate agency in a smaller community, it might make sense to do a direct mailing to all of the homeowners there (but that won’t let you reach people who might be planning to move to your community from another location).
However, for millions of other organizations—for those of us who are professionals, musicians, artists, nonprofit organizations, churches, and niche product companies—traditional advertising is generally so wide and broad that it is ineffective. A great strategy for Procter & Gamble, Disney, and a U.S. presidential candidate—reaching large numbers of people with a message of broad national appeal—just doesn’t work for niche products, local services, and specialized nonprofit organizations.
The web has opened a tremendous opportunity to reach niche buyers directly with targeted information that costs a fraction of what big-budget advertising costs.
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