Alright, well, maybe don’t ditch it completely. It still has its place in certain situations, but stop making it your main method of marketing your business!
Interruption marketing is DEAD. Alright, well, maybe not dead. But it’s been fatally wounded. It’s lying on the floor, bleeding out fast and reaching for it’s gun so it can fire back in vengeance. So you can either stand there and let it take you down with it, or you can finish it off!
Easy decision.
Interruption marketing is any type of marketing or advertising that gets in the way of what people want to be doing or seeing in order to deliver a message. When a commercial interrupts your favourite TV show, that’s an interruption. When a billboard blocks out the beautiful scenery, that’s an interruption.
This should all sound familiar because interruption marketing has been the go to for marketers trying to sell just about everything for just about forever. Don’t judge the marketers of our past though because they had good reason to be so interrupting. It worked. It worked really, really well.
It doesn’t work anymore though. People don’t want to see commercials so they TiVo shows and fast forward past them. People don’t want your junk mail. They don’t want your radio commercials costing them time they could be using to hear Van Halen. They don’t want anything from you (as far as marketing goes) that they didn’t essentially ask for.
And they’ve gotten incredibly good at blocking you out. Your commercial ends and 30 seconds later they’ve forgotten what it was about. They walk down the street past hundreds of ads and don’t notice a single one of them. They’re ad-blind. It’s a well documented phenomenon. It’s real and it’s costing you money.
So why do so many businesses still spend so much time, effort and money on stuff that doesn’t work? Well, the main reason is that huge corporations have equally huge marketing budgets and they don’t mind spending a million dollars to put up a billboard that might have an effect on you if you see it enough times over the next six months.
But you’re a small or medium sized business and you can’t do that (nor should you want to). So why do so many small businesses still spend the majority of their marketing dollars on junk mail, annoying radio ads and badly produced local TV commercials?
The reason is that they don’t fully understand the alternative. And you can’t fault them because it’s a very new alternative. What is that alternative? And how many times can I write alternative in the same paragraph?
Market to people when and where they want to be marketed to.
Saying that often makes marketing people, especially the ad folks working at big agencies, gasp, scream, faint, vomit, you name it. But get used to it because it is the future of marketing. Gone are the days of force feeding people ads and having them smile and hand over their money.
So how do you market to people when and where they want? Well, there are a lot of ways a smart business can do this. Here are just a few:
1) Use permission based marketing.
A great example of this is permission based newsletters. Sending someone an email they don’t want is SPAM and it pissed people off. But sending someone an email they’ve specifically asked to receive, even if it’s promotional, is good service. People won’t hold it against you for sending them emails they’ve asked for, and even if they don’t read them, just seeing your name in their inbox on a regular basis can go along way to build brand recognition.
2) Put yourself where they want to see you, not where you want them to see you.
Don’t push your marketing on people, let people come to your marketing. Use the web to ensure that every time someone goes looking for information about what you do or what you sell, or a closely related topic, you’re there. When people go to Google and do a search on a product or service, they’re seeking out information and they won’t be annoyed when they find marketing material. In fact they’ll be incredibly receptive to it. You can’t afford not to be there when they go looking.
3) Make your marketing something worth seeing.
Why do beer drinkers love beer commercials? Because they’re normally pretty funny. Why can some companies take markets by storm with viral media? Because their video is so wacky, funny, unbelievable, or whatever, that people want to watch it. Games, contests, videos, the list goes on. Interactivity is the name of the game. Whether they’re playing with an application on you website or forwarding your video to their friends, people shouldn’t just be seeing your brand, they should be interacting with it.
4) Realize and embrace the fact that the users now control the content.
Back in the day if you wanted to watch Charlie’s Angels you’d plunk your butt down in front of the TV on Wednesday night at 9:00pm and you’d grin and take in every moment, including the ads. Those days are gone. Long gone. Now, if you want to watch 24 or Lost or whatever, you might watch it when it airs. Or maybe you’ll TiVo it. Or maybe you’ll get it on the network website. Or maybe you’ll get if off iTunes. Or maybe you’ll downloaded it illegally. See the difference?
People have more choice than ever in deciding what gets in front of their eyes. So you can either realize that and give them what they want, and benefit from it, or you can ignore it, keep shoving what you want in front of them, and suffer the backlash.
