5 … 4 … 3 … 2 … Skip Ad > >
I so hate this drill, especially when I hop on to YouTube to watch a Tom Cruise video. I literally despise these pre-roll ads. These ads are so annoyingly right in my face.
I didn’t log in to YouTube to watch a father scolding his son for losing his laptop and then the son buying a refurbished laptop from a popular ecommerce website (Ad Name: “As Good as New”). Though I’m an online shopaholic but at my own convenience and desired time. I mean I don’t love that shopping portal enough to come in between Tom Cruise (virtually) and me and hamper my video-watching experience like that.
I hate such brands that do NOT seek my permission and expose me to their marketing messages hundred times a day. This triggers a barrage of questions in my mind about their marketing strategy (and their marketers in particular!).
I feel so fortunate as a marketer in my career to have seen traditional marketing getting redundant and less effective in the last decade and subsequently wiped out by permission-based marketing in last 2-3 years. According to an Adobe study, marketing has changed more in the last 2 years than in the last 50 years.
As marketers, we need to acknowledge and respect the fact that with technology adoption gaining pace with each passing day, people are are getting better at blocking out these interruptions.
- TV ads…We’ve TiVO/DVRs to skip advertisements. I so love Netflix’s House of Cards, free of advertising.
- Radio ads…Users have XM/Sirius Radio/Pandora/Spotify to cut their advertising reach
- Unsolicited (cold calls)…Fortunately, we’ve national Do Not Call Registry.
- Spammy emails ….I routinely employ spam filters.
As a matter of fact, a large number of organizations are still not convinced about the merits of permission-based marketing for two reasons:
- Their otherwise expensive outbound methods have fetched results for them so far. So new approach means new risk to revenues. And, not many are risk takers.
- Permission-based marketing requires investment in terms of resources, effort, time and money. And, most of all, PATIENCE for long-term rewards.
So, such brands resort to “spray and pray approach” and thus still do “batch and blast” email campaigns and pray for leads online. And when the results do not pour in, it feels like as depicted in the picture below.
I love this brilliant quote from Dharmesh Shah, cofounder HubSpot
“Market unto others as they would market unto you” –@dharmesh#INBOUND15
— HubSpot (@HubSpot) September 9, 2015
The bottom line is that people are now wary of traditional outbound marketing messages and adept at blocking outbound marketers out. Netizens now learn about and shop from brands in a new way – through search engines, blogosphere and social media sites.
To be successful in today’s times, we need to match our marketing mannerisms to the way our prospects gather information and shop for our products.
How?
Generate leads through #Inbound marketing and target customers with relevance marketing.
Options for marketers:
Marketers either need to adapt to the changing shopping behavior of customers or risk extinction. Only mantra for success: GO #inbound
— Raina (@rainamtrivedi) October 24, 2015
Raina Trivedi's Blog 