For a significant number of modern UK businesses, online marketing spend encompasses a considerable chunk of their overall marketing budget. It’s hardly surprising really – online marketing is still an emerging field and companies are understandably eager to make the most of networked devices such as Smartphones, tablets and laptops that mean that consumers are rarely out of contact with the internet for more than a few hours. With all that money flying around along with lots of new ideas and a liberal helping of enthusiasm, you’d think that online marketing would be pulling businesses up the corporate ladder by their bootlaces, but in many cases it isn’t.
According to a recent study undertaken by US software giants Adobe, only 3% of consumers actually like to be exposed to advertisements online, compared to a whopping 45% who’d prefer them as magazine features in their favourite glossy rag. Furthermore, the opinions gleaned by the Adobe researchers revealed that consumers find online ads ‘annoying’, ‘distracting’ and ‘all over the place’. Quite simply, pop ups and banner ads drive people mad – they’re the online equivalent of the junk mail and circulars you get shoved through your letter box on a daily basis.
Advertising vs. marketing
So, if people tend to, at best, ignore online advertising and, at worst, actively despise it, does this meant that online marketing itself is ineffective? The answer, as the astute amongst you will have no doubt surmised, is a resounding ‘no’. The fact of the matter is that people engage with online content in a completely different way to other, more traditional forms of entertainment. Although it’s still a changing medium, television is far more passive than the web, and so is radio – consumers will let adverts and marketing materials wash over them as they take a backseat role in their own entertainment. Magazines, too, are comparatively sedate – people leaf through them at their leisure, pausing on advertising features that catch their eyes but skipping past most others.
With the internet, though, engagement is a completely different matter. People expect to navigate directly to the pages they require and don’t want to wade through acres of advertising material to get there – they’ve been spoilt by superfast broadband connection speeds and intuitive user interfaces, so anything that slows them down or distracts them is going to be viewed with annoyance at best. Online advertising, by its very nature, is all about trying to detract attention from a browser’s original intent.
Encourage your audience to come to you
Think about the way in which you engage with the internet. For the vast majority of people, the web is less of a tool than it is a playground and a library. You’ll flit from site to site, reading articles and blog posts or looking at pages that entertain you, perhaps even sharing them with your friends or colleagues.
One of the core reasons content marketing is successful is because it doesn’t ask consumers to change their online behaviour or force a sales pitch down their throats like conventional online advertising. Instead, those blog posts and articles that are read and disseminated among interested online users are your own, and they contain links back to your homepage and subtle calls to action for your products and services. Don’t be fooled by the allure of quick and easy online marketing ‘success’ – in order to engage with your audience, you need entertaining, well-written content that they’ll actually want to read, so get out there and create it! Start by thinking of who your audience is; if they were to read a magazine about your industry, what sorts of articles might they be interested in? The trick is to create something that’s as interesting without your name on it as it would be with it – once you’ve mastered that, you’re a step closer to mastering content marketing for your business as a whole.