A good friend of mine sent me a link to a piece on Inbound Marketing and asked my opinion on what I read. The piece can be seen HERE. What follows is my response to anyone who believes that Inbound Marketing and Social Marketing can take the place of Mass Media in general and radio in particular.
Greetings:
I hope you will post my reply even if I question you on facts and assumptions:
I read your piece “Let your brain do the heavy lifting” and have to take exception with a few things in your piece:
While I agree that “inbound Marketing” the way you describe it can be a viable way to obtain new customers, I have to start with a rather obvious question: How do you get people to FIND you? According to Netcraft, there were some 644 million active web sites on the Internet as of 2012. Lets digest that a second… 644,000,000 web sites. Since many people use the “internet” as one of their primary home entertainment choices, you are looking at what would be a TV set with 644,000,000 channels!
So the question comes, how do you get people to find you? The initial answer WAS SEO (Search Engine Optimization) which was designed to use keywords and links to make you FIRST in a search engine return. Now however, everyone is using SEO and the player with the most money typically has the best SEO. Just ask Amazon. But SEO alone does not do the trick. This is why even huge companies like Apple, Google, the aforementioned Amazon and even Microsoft spend huge dollars to direct people to their web sites. How do they do it? With what you classify as “Money Marketing”.
Inbound marketing can help you find customers if you are a highly specialized business looking to reach a small and elusive market. This market is typically a highly educated market who uses the Internet for research. An inbound marketing campaign typically uses a combination of pertinent blogging, videos, ebooks, enewsletters, whitepapers, so-called “social Media Marketing” and other forms of targeted content marketing. However unlike mass marketing (Television, Newspaper, Radio etc.), inbound marketing does not provide REACH. In other words Inbound Marketing falls short when trying to connect to new people… people who may not even know about your product or service. Additionally, if you sell anything that is available from a larger company, you have to out-blog, out e-mail and out social media them.
Lest you think that just smaller companies make errors in Social Media campaigns and Inbound Marketing, take a look at the case of the Pepsi Refresh Project. There is an interesting white paper on this particular project here.
Imagine being a company as big as Pepsi, able to hire the best people there are.. afford the best SEO out there and getting these results.
Can Mass Media build relationships? Ask anyone who ever listened to Paul Harvey. They never had a two way conversation with him yet they still went out and bought Wells Lamont gloves and Neutrogena Hand Cream by the carload. Tom Bodett sold us a low budget hotel room that was clean and comfortable, and he left the light on for us.
Cold Calling: Does it work? How would the average business person ever find out about something new were it not for the sales person who came in and introduced a product or service? In the book The IBM Way, the cover photo shows Kam Leung, one of IBMs first four employee in Hong Kong in 1957 ferrying an IBM typewriter across Victoria Harbor to a Norwegian ship at anchor, where he gave a demonstration. It was NOT an easy ride in a sampan, but that spirit of service to the customer is what make a sale. Taking the term “Cold Call” literally to man a phone call… well sales people who do their jobs in this day and age would die by using just the telephone, or by mass emailing. Makes you wonder if people have actually heard of spam filters doesn’t it? A cold calling sales person is a person with an idea. They are always worth giving a few minutes to.
I have to take exception with you assessment that doing absolutely nothing is better than doing a little. Someone sees every ad and someone hears every ad. Will they respond? It depends upon YOUR offer. Imagine a scale where on one side is what you say, and on the other side is how many times you say it. If the message is strong, you don’t have to say it too many times. In my market there is a store called Dillards. They sell high quality clothing. Many of my shirts, pants and suits come from there. But WHEN do I shop? When they hold their seasonal clearance. This is when I buy $300 sport coats for $79. When I buy $99 designer dress shirts for $7.00 (that is not a typo) each… and I buy every one they have in my size. Do they advertise this sale? Yes… one quick ad campaign on the radio and the store is packed. The rest of the year they advertise like mad on Radio, TV and newspaper. Why? because their offer of full price merchandise is not as strong as the low price offer and requires more convincing to get people into the store.
Finally as to advertising expenditures decreasing, according to Kantar Media, spending among the ten largest advertisers in the US in Q2 2013, ad expenditures are up 15.7%. Among the top 100 marketers ad spending is up 10% while direct response spending during the same time was off some 13.1%.
To be fair: I operate a bunch of radio stations in Western Arizona. We have 20 some web sites and are software developers. We own a small billboard company. We own five retail businesses. I was educated in economics and accounting as well as business administration and I have been helping businesses with marketing solutions since 1976 which means either I have been and am getting results for businesses that use my radio stations, or I am the best con man in the business!
Chris Rolando
at February 26, 2024 10:08 AM PST
