I read a very interesting article this week on ClickZ entitled “The End of Lazy Marketing.” The author, Mark Kingdon, makes the following observations:

* The Internet is quickly becoming the “can’t live without” choice over TV.
* Creation and connection rule as the social Web becomes the big story of 2006. There are more people on MySpace today than were Internet users in the US in 1998.
* People are walking Tivos as they unconsciously and consciously filter out the 3,000+ messages we blitz them with every day.
* The Internet accounts for only 6 percent of marketing spend and 24 percent of consumers’ media consumption. Very quickly, those figures will equalize at the expense of TV and print.

The underlying theme here is that you cannot rely on being able to reach your audience through broad or “lazy” means anymore. In order to increase effectiveness of your marketing, it must be contextual/environment-specific marketing and it must have an eye towards increased engagement. This is not just about spending more money online and less on TV, but about making sure your message is being heard loud and clear. Less eyeballs does not necessarily equate to lower traction. At TechTarget, we have moved towards a topically-based approach to communicating to our user base and have seen the response and engagement increase dramatically. Along these lines, RSS feeds, while still in relative infancy, are also gaining traction - the idea being “show me only what I am looking for.”

Are you currently integrating this approach into your marketing efforts?

This entry was posted on Monday, October 16th, 2006 at 11:08 am and is filed under Customized Media, Podcasts, Blogs & Video, Media Response Tests, Integrated Media, Best practices, Branding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.