Recap: My Modern Online Marketing Strategies

In recent weeks, I’ve proposed a new paradigm for online marketing strategy. Together these posts outline how I think about modern online marketing, and how I recommend that you do, too.

This 3 part series of blog posts has included:

- "Why your crappy Web Site is not enough"
- "How to Stop Begging for Customers" 
- "They’re talking about YOU in the Reputation Cloud!"

In case you missed these posts, here’s a helpful summary of my "Modern Online Marketing Strategies":

Traditional marketing was one-way, usually “shouting” at broadly targeted groups of potential customers. The hope was that some of those customers would appreciate the message enough to purchase a sponsor’s product.

Today this approach has been superseded by Internet marketing which allows much more targeted and interactive strategies.

The “cowboy marketing” of Web 1.0 where marketers simply try to herd customers toward their corporate web sites is no longer enough to be effective, however.

Instead, modern marketers need to consider, and carefully manage, their brands and product messages across media and platforms.

I recommend pursuing a strategy of “Distributed Engagement”, where marketing messages are delivered directly to targeted consumer groups online in their natural habitats – where they naturally congregate and converse online. (This diagram illustrates some of the many venues available to your marketing message today.)

This means marketing beyond your web site to expand your “Product Presence” to social networks like Facebook and Myspace, to online forums and discussion groups, to posting videos on your own site and on YouTube, and to publishing blogs and email newsletters regularly.  This approach presumes a level of interactivity unprecedented in the 20th century. In other words, in a Web 2.0 world you need to be ready to discuss the merits of your products with questioning customers!

The goal of successful Distributed Engagement marketing includes influencing your brand’s “Reputation Cloud”. This “reputation cloud” is the collection of:

• your own, deliberate marketing efforts,
• plus the effects of your advertising and that of partners,
• plus (most importantly) the commentary about your company and product created by consumers, competitors, and potential customers across the Web.

To succeed online today, it’s important to think not just about maximizing your own web site’s effectiveness or immediate revenues, but also to implement strategies for customer engagement that maximize your longer term and wider spread reputation enhancement.

In fact, the more you engage customers, and appreciate their feedback, the more success you’ll find online. Doing so positions you and your products to leverage the Internet’s viral promotions potential through the word-of-mouth that satisfied customers offer to market leaders.

Thanks to the many commenters, especially Eddie Lewis, who contributed to the evolution of these posts in recent weeks.

Please look for more details and examples of these principles in my new book, to be published next spring by AMACOM Books.