As I write this, I am considering buying a new car. As it is for billions of other global consumers, the web is my primary source of information when I consider a purchase. So I sat down at the computer and began poking around.
Figuring they were the natural place to begin my research, I started with some major automaker sites. That was a big mistake. I was assaulted on the homepages with a barrage of TV-style broadcast advertising. And most of the one-way messages focused on price. For example, at Ford,1 the all-capital-letters headline screamed, âYEAR END EVENT FINAL DAYS. UP to $1,500 TOTAL CASH.â Dodge2 announced a similar offer: âBIG FINISH 2016. GET 20% OFF MSRP.â Other manufacturers touted similar flashy offers.
Iâm not planning to buy a car in the next 100 hours, thank you. I may not even buy one within 100 days! Iâm just kicking the virtual tires. These sites and most others assume that Iâm ready to buy a car right now. But I actually just wanted to learn something. Sure, I got graphics and animation, TV commercials, pretty pictures, and low financing offers on these sites, but little else.
I looked around for some personality on these sites and didnât find much, because the automaker websites portray their organizations as nameless, faceless corporations. In fact, the sites I looked at are so similar that theyâre effectively interchangeable. At each site, I felt as if I was being marketed to with a string of messages that had been developed in a lab or via focus groups. It just didnât feel authentic. If I wanted to see car TV ads, I would have flipped on the TV. I was struck with the odd feeling that all large automakersâ sites were designed and built by the same Madison Avenue ad guy. These sites were advertising to me, not building a relationship with me. They were luring me in with one-way messages, not educating me about the companiesâ products. Guess what? When I arrive at a site, you donât need to grab my attention; you already have it!
Automakers have become addicted to the crack cocaine of marketing: big-budget TV commercials and other offline advertising. Everywhere I turn, I see automobile ads that make me think, âThis has got to be really freakinâ expensive.â The television commercials, the âsponsored byâ stuff, the sales âevents,â and other high-ticket Madison Avenue marketing might make you feel good, but is it effective?
These days, when people are thinking of buying a car (or any other product or service), they usually go to the web first. Even my 85-year-old mother does it! When people come to you online, they are not looking for TV commercials. They are looking for information to help them make a decision.
Hereâs the good news: I did find some terrific places on the web to learn about cars. Unfortunately, the places where I got authentic content and where I became educated and where I interacted with humans werenât part of the automakersâ sites. Edmunds Forums3 is a free, consumer-driven, social networking and personal pages site. It features photo albums, user groups based on make and model of car, and favorite links. The site was excellent in helping me narrow down choices. For example, in the forums, I could read hundreds of messages about each car I was considering. I could see pages where owners showed off their vehicles. This is where I was making my decision, dozens of clicks removed from the big automaker sites.
Since I first wrote about automaker sites on my blog, hundreds of people have jumped in to comment or email me with similar car-shopping experiences and frustrations with automaker websites. And while I certainly recognize that the automakers have improved their sites since I first wrote about them, the focus is still on advertising. Something is seriously broken in the automobile business if so many people tell me they are unable to find, directly on a company site, the information they need to make a purchase decision.
But itâs not just automakers.
Think about your own buying habits. Do you make purchase decisions based on your independent research, via information you find with search engines like Google? Of course you do! Do you contact your friends and colleagues via social media like Facebook and ask them about products and services youâre interested in? If so, you are not alone. And yet many sellers fail to reach you in this process.
In the years before she headed to college, my daughter researched appropriate schools by searching online and connecting with her friends. Over the course of her high school years, she carefully narrowed her choices down to a handful of schools that were a good fit for her. When applications were due, she was all set.
Yet in the months leading up to the application deadline, she received hundreds of very expensive direct-mail packages from universities around the world. Many sent large, thick envelopes containing glossy brochures with hundreds of pages. These efforts were completely wasted, because my daughter had already made up her mind by doing her own research on the web. This huge investment in direct-mail advertising simply didnât work.
Before the web, organizations had only two significant options for attracting attention: Buy expensive advertising or get third-party ink from the media. But the web has changed the rules. The web is not TV. Organizations that understand the New Rules of Marketing and PR develop relationships directly with consumers like you and me.
Iâd like to pause here a moment for a clarification. When I talk about the new rules and compare them to the old rules, I donât mean to suggest that all organizations should immediately drop their existing marketing and PR programs and use this bookâs ideas exclusively. Moreover, Iâm not of the belief that the only marketing worth doing is on the web. If your newspaper advertisements, telephone directory listings, media outreach, and other programs are working for you, thatâs great! Please keep going. There is room in many marketing and PR programs for traditional techniques.
That being said, thereâs no doubt that today people solve problems by turning to the web. Iâm sure you do too. Just reflect on your own habits as you contemplate a purchase.
Consider another form of marketing, the art of finding a new job. Several times per month, I receive email or phone calls from people who are searching for work. They usually send their resume (CV) to me and want to network with me to find a job. What these people are doing is advertising a product (their labor) by sending me an unsolicited email message. Like the auto companies and the universities, the typical job seeker is advertising a product. Yet the vast majority of these people are not positioning themselves to be found on the web, because they donât have a personal website, they arenât blogging or creating online videos, and, except for maybe a Facebook or LinkedIn profile, they arenât active in social networking. They are not creating the content that will help an employer to find them when a company needs new staff.
If you arenât present and engaged in the places and at the times that your buyers are, then youâre losing out on potential businessâno matter whether youâre looking for a job or marketing your companyâs product or your organizationâs service. Worse, if you are trying to apply the game plan that works in your mainstream-media-based advertising and public relations (PR) programs to your online efforts, you will not be successful.
So take a minute to ask yourself this simple question: How are my existing advertising and media relations programs working?
Advertising: A Money Pit of Wasted Resources
In the old days, traditional, nontargeted advertising via newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and direct mail was the only way to go. But these media make it very difficult to target specific buyers with individualized content. Yes, advertising is still used for megabrands with broad reach and probably still works for some organizations and products (though not as well as before). Guys watching football on TV drink a lot of beer, so perhaps it makes sense for mass marketer Budweiser to advertise on NFL broadcasts (but not for small microbrews that appeal to a small niche customer base to do so). Advertising also works in many trade publications. If your company makes deck sealant, then you probably want to advertise in Professional Deck Builder magazine to reach your buyers (but that wonât allow you to reach the do-it-yourself market). If you run a local real estate agency in a smaller community, it might make sense to do a direct mailing to all of the homeowners there (but that wonât let you reach people who might be planning to move to your community from another location).
However, for millions of other organizationsâfor those of us who are professionals, musicians, artists, nonprofit organizations, churches, and niche product companiesâtraditional advertising is generally so wide and broad that it is ineffective. A great strategy for Procter & Gamble, Disney, and a U.S. presidential candidateâreaching large numbers of people with a message of broad national appealâjust doesnât work for niche products, local services, and...