Customer Service and Branding

Posted on November 17, 2021 by ianotr

Customer Service and Your Brand
Often when we think of our company’s brand we think of the logo or other distinctive trademark, but there’s much more to our brand then just a distinctive and recognizable mark.

One morning I walked into a department store wearing my well-worn brown leather jacket. I was looking at some dress slacks and shirts and when I took my jacket off, the clerk noticed that the inside lining of the jacket was showing signs of wear. He immediately checked and came back to tell me that they could replace the lining and have it ready for me later that day. I was of course impressed with the attentive service and asked how much this would cost? His reply was no cost, as that is a service we provide for our customers. I then said, but I didn’t buy the jacket from your store. He gave me that look that said, you don’t think I know my own stock? And replied, I know this is not from our store but you are a customer and this is a service we provide for our customers. At that point I didn’t want to say, but I am a visitor from Canada, as I did not want to get that look again, this time saying, you think I didn’t recognize your accent?

I then went on to purchase a couple pairs of slacks, a few shirts and a pair of shoes. Interestingly enough I never did get the lining of my jacket replaced as we were leaving that afternoon to head back home and there was no time. It has been well over 20 years since that particular incident took place and as I sat today to write this article on the relationship between customer service and branding, that day and that store was what immediately came to mind. You can imagine how the favorable perception of the store, the clerk and stores brand has been implanted (or branded) in my memory.

In an era when companies are now charging for every perceived “extra” such as a few inches of extra legroom, or your luggage or your in-flight meal, (just picking on airlines). It makes one wonder how this impacts their brand, how their customers perceive them? The word that comes to mind is, “cheap”. That is not how I want customers to think of our company, as I am sure it is not how you would want customers to think of your business.

You hear people say, well everyone is doing it, and I think what an excellent time to set your business apart from the rest. Unless you have some proprietary product that everyone needs and can charge and do whatever you wish, then the only thing that we as business people have to offer is exemplary customer service.

Think about your brand as more than just your look, but rather the overall customer experience with your business. Place yourself in the customer’s shoes and imagine dealing with your company and envision that experience and determine if you would like to go through it. I think the CEO of our auto club should try to order travel insurance by calling into a service center. You’re greeted with a pleasant recorded voice saying thank you for calling the Motor Association; please listen carefully as our options have changed. Press one for this, press two for this, press three for that, and press four lastly for what you wanted. Finally I will get to speak to someone, but alas I get the voice, thank you for calling the Motor Association insurance division, please listen carefully as our options have changed. This time I’m greeted with seven separate options! At this point I’m wondering if my existing insurance covers suicide, as I wish to slice my wrists or at least cancel my trip.

Okay they saved a few bucks, but at what cost to my perception of their business and brand?

Of course it is a good thing to review your brand from every aspect. Is your creative consistent across your entire organization? Is the same “look and feel” consistently deployed across e-mail, marketing, newsletter, tradeshow booth, corporate webpage, pricing sheets, sales proposals, business cards, and any other branding opportunity? However you can do all that exactly right, consistent everywhere, and all people are reminded of is cheap because they are charging me for my bag, or they saved a few dollars by not having a receptionist.

By all means review your brand but at the same time review your customers experience.

Ian Conklin – President
OTR Web Solutions Inc
http://www.otronline.com

Social Media & Content Marketing Part 11

Posted on December 9, 2016 by ianotr

Social Media & Content Marketing

Social Media opens many new doors instantly

Social media has provided a big boost to content marketing because it allows you to organize audiences that you create into groups. It’s possible to use one social media platform to talk with various groups of followers. Using various platforms to reach various niches is an option, but the more interaction can be consolidated into one place, the easier it is to manage your social media campaigns.

Audience Size

The beauty of content marketing is that it does not have to reach millions of people to have an impact. Crafting niche content that attracts one thousand followers who have the intent to make online purchases is not a difficult goal to reach anymore. Analytics give us a lot of numbers to think about such as page views and number of unique visitors, but as soon as you can attract hundreds of followers, it’s possible to develop a steady stream of online income.

An online audience can essentially be built for free if you take the time to connect with new people one at a time. Finding five new online friends per day is enough to build a base of over 100 followers in a month. All you really have to do is click people after studying their profile. Each of the major social networks has a system for requesting online friendships. Google+ is a social network that encourages new relationships.Facebook puts audience limits on personal profiles but allows professional profiles to have thousands of followers. Audience size is based on how much time you want to invest in building it.

Friends of Friends

The key to building a loyal market that reflects your values, is to build a network one person at a time with individuals who match your target market. This project can take several months, but it simply involves interacting with friends of friends on social networks, leading to a maze of new contacts. You simply study a friend’s profile and look for people who share your views. It’s a good idea to avoid people who don’t share your views so that you can avoid a lot of long time consuming conversations.

As people who like the same things are grouped into networks, it becomes easier for like-minded people to connect more often. It’s important for friends to “like” each other’s posts on Facebook because it tells Facebook the content is important. It gives Facebook a better idea of which content should be displayed on individual news feeds.

Personalized Market Research

One of the most profound ways social media has revolutionized marketing is that it has created a more intense focus on actual individuals rather than treating customers as statistics. You can now find out many things about a customer through social media interactivity that was not known by marketers in the past. Finding out someone’s favorite movies or sports teams might be an ice breaker in a conversation about selling tax preparation services.

Social media has become a barometer for how respected you are as an online entertainer. You can figure out which type of posts get the best reactions. You can study the posts of popular social media superstars. You can also learn who your most loyal supporters are and the content they like the most. Social media lets you learn the emotions and inside stories about your market, giving you a better sense of awareness than raw statistics.

Facebook and other social networks have allowed believers in the same message to find each other easily online. Take the lead in content marketing by joining social network groups devoted to your topic and make new genuine friendships.

Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web, a web development company creating market ready websites since 2000, with locations in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

OTR Web – Delivers What You Need With Style.

For all your Inbound Marketing and Website requirements

Contact OTR Web

Multimedia Entertainment & Content Marketing Part 10

Posted on July 18, 2016 by ianotr

Multimedia Entertainment & Content Marketing

Technology Lets Us Be More Entertaining

Technology has turned many individuals into multimedia entertainers. No longer are art and commerce considered far apart, as it usually takes some form of graphic art to bring brands to life through content marketing. People appreciate the combination of not only text with photographs, but text with video, audio, animation, infographics or other form of digital expression.

Online Entertainers

Social media and mobile technology are the two important factors that give anyone access to creating their own media channel. Facebook alone has accelerated society into a state in which creating and sharing customized media is becoming common. No longer is fame a distant destination. It’s possible to build an online following just by adding remarks to news articles. The tools are now in place for anyone to entertain an audience on a daily basis and build the audience through social networks.

Last century many people had dreams about being entertainers but did not train themselves to be entertainers. People were taught that the chances of making it as a star in the entertainment business were slim. Last century it took a lot of effort to get 10 people to show up to an event. This century’s tools make it possible to put communities together in the hundreds or thousands all because of the direction that content marketing is moving, which is mixing information with entertainment.

Niche Video Stars

YouTube has created an incredible number of niche video stars in the new century. It’s important to understand that this shift toward allowing anyone in the public to have their own video channel with no prior video experience has dramatically changed many of the rules about video production. No longer does production have to be slick and carefully scripted.

Most of the videos you find on YouTube designed for business presentation is much more relaxed than the characters you might see in a television commercial. People have learned to be themselves on camera after a few decades of home movies. It turns out that acting comfortable on camera does not require acting lessons or a Hollywood resume.

The growing popularity of YouTube is a signal that online video is here to stay and that home video can be taken seriously when it captures memorable content. The combination of producing useful video content in an entertaining way with appropriate tags can help build an online following, especially since Google now gives high rankings to unique informative videos.

Multimedia Experimentation

Content marketing is all about experimenting with various multimedia to get the attention of an online audience. Video has been the most common way to showcase the new paradigm of multimedia entertainment. Audiences have been latching onto video games, animation and slide shows in addition to consuming niche videos that are not necessarily targeted for a large audience.

We are still in an age in which the limits of multimedia are undefined. Multimedia has been a slowly brewing dimension that can go many creative directions. The interactive quality of multimedia continues to be a wide open frontier for tech designers. The more developers can get people to interact with their gadgets, the more multimedia becomes a seamless part of everyday life. Apps have helped multimedia become mainstream.

But new ideas for multimedia do not necessarily have to come from engineers. Like people who upload videos to YouTube or music to ReverbNation, anyone can experiment with content to expand the possibilities of multimedia. There are enough tools to play with, such as WordPress, Photoshop and iMovie, to create captivating presentations. Take the lead in multimedia production by working with creative graphic artists who understand animation.

Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web, a web development company creating market ready websites since 2000, with locations in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

OTR Web – Delivers What You Need With Style.

For all your Inbound Marketing and Website requirements

Contact OTR Web

Inbound Marketing & Business Relationships Part 9

Posted on May 24, 2016 by ianotr

Inbound Marketing & Business Relationships

Business relationships are becoming more personalized

The era of customers being treated only as statistics is ending. A more personalized approach to marketing is becoming more common, especially when it comes to business relationships that involve a lot of transactions. Loyalty and trust have become the benchmarks to winning online business through inbound marketing, which connects niche markets with unique content about the products.

Personalized Business Culture

One of the feelings you can easily get exploring the web is that it’s much easier to communicate with a CEO or managers of small companies than getting any kind of response from big business management. The internet can be used to strengthen associations in a matter of clicks on a contact page. Marketing software allows a company to create profiles for each of their customers. Businesses that use marketing software can establish closer relationships with customers and categorize them according to their purchasing behavior.

At one time everyone was pitched by pushy sales people. But the internet has made almost every industry more competitive, so a lot of the pushy attitude has faded. Pushy sales techniques have become bothersome because they can waste the time of a person not interested in the product. The hard sell approach began to become very unpopular during the financial crash of 2008, which found half the country deep in credit card debt. The financial crash caused many people to pay closer attention to their expenses and to the businesses they spend money on.

Community Vision

The key to understanding how inbound marketing is changing the business world is that many business decisions now relate to shared vision. Crowdfunding is a form of shared vision that offers alternative ways to fund projects. Small businesses, through creativity and partnerships, can succeed by serving the needs of online communities with similar visions.

When you think of all the different communities that exist in the world, it’s unlikely that there is a definitive website for every community. How many times have you tried searching online for something that you knew existed but the search delivered zero search results? The point is that it is fairly easy to start a website devoted to an existing large community without facing much competition.

Trying to get to know a thousand different people online is no longer a big issue, since friends from Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn can end up being in the thousands for any given person. It’s now fairly simple to connect with real people online as business is naturally becoming more social media-friendly and personalized. More than ever before, there is a need to document as much information about customer behavior as possible, especially if they care about the company’s vision.

How Business Becomes Personalized

One way that business becomes personalized is through a constant reminder such as a newsletter. A well written blog has a personalized feel and becomes even more personalized with reader comments. For many businesses, their social media profile delivers their personal message to the world. For free, a business can build content on a Facebook page and then have their web domain point to the Facebook page. Social media interaction is how many business relationships permeate over time.

Perhaps the most important reason why business is becoming more personalized is that consumers have quickly adopted trust as the main criterion for establishing loyalty with a business. Trust can be built on elaborate inbound marketing through deep devotion to the product. It can also be built on open discussions about customer feedback. Take the lead in earning the trust of online followers by sharing a wealth of meaningful information about your industry.

Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web, a web development company creating market ready websites since 2000, with locations in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

OTR Web – Delivers What You Need With Style.

For all your Inbound Marketing and Web requirements

Contact OTR Web.

Content Marketing & Thought Leaders Part 8

Posted on April 26, 2016 by ianotr

Thought Leaders & Content Marketing

Consumers are gravitating toward Thought Leaders

Bloggers are the stars of the online world in terms of being viewed as influencers by search engines if they are popular and authoritative enough. Blogging is part of what makes content marketing valuable since effective blogs can create online followings. The reason blogs have become important in SEO is that they represent a chance to bring keywords to life in a unique story.

Blogs vs Articles

Many people have used the terms “blogs” and “articles” interchangeably, but the two are very different. Articles are written in a more traditional style, almost like a newspaper story, whereas blogs are more conversational and creative while delivering information that can be hard to find elsewhere. Another big difference is that blogs are written from the perspective of an expert, whereas articles are written by objective observers who can be anybody.

When you think about it, if you’re not getting information from an expert, why should you trust the information? Search engines favor experts because they are better sources than non-experts. The internet is flooded with articles by non-experts who are mostly duplicating information that already exists. Bloggers, on the other hand, offer new information and original perspectives, which are two components of content marketing that search engines reward.

How Blogs Become Big

Big media helps put the spotlight on popular bloggers, but it’s also possible to develop a blog that grows in popularity organically. The main strategy for building an organic online following is the combination of SEO and unique content that can be categorized many different ways. Your blog can be planned out many months in advance based on all the different angles you see in an industry.

When you think of all the different types of people who are attracted to your industry and start writing blogs about the different reasons people use certain products, you can gain acceptance as a leading observer in that field. Once you’ve written about a hundred quality blogs about your industry, it’s likely that your name or brand will be referenced in many different ways associated with the industry in search engines. The more unique blogs you write, the more chances search engines will consider you to be an authoritative expert.

Maximizing Blogs

Not all blogs are successful partly because not everyone is a good storyteller. Certain industries work well with blogging if they are already very detail-oriented. Sharing food recipes, for example, can create endless excitement for cooking fans since there are infinite ways to prepare food. But sharing information on how to operate machinery used in redundant situations is not the best approach to blogging if it doesn’t spawn many different ideas.

Ideally, you want to create blogs that other people share on social networks. One of the ways to make a blog attractive is to start with a colorful photograph, design or infographic. A blog that accompanies a picture and video has extra advantages. The reason you want to make sure the blog has a nice picture is because people see hundreds of stories and pictures as they scroll through their social network newsfeeds, but only so many catch their attention.

A blogger who interviews experts, especially on video, can gain even more credibility. By taking the role of a multimedia curator who explores an industry deeply, you can gain the reputation of a Thought Leader. When your blog becomes what people turn to with high expectation of gaining new information, you have become a Thought Leader, a monumental goal of bloggers. Take the lead in content marketing by reviewing new products and helping other bloggers create a buzz about them.

Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web, a web development company creating market ready websites since 2000, with locations in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

OTR Web is a Certified Partner with HubSpot and Google.

For all your Inbound Marketing and Website requirements

Contact OTR Web.

Content Management Systems

Posted on February 5, 2016 by ianotr

Content Management Systems

In order to get people to find you, you have to make friends with the search engines. In order to make friends with the search engines, you have to have fresh, relevant content that the algorithms find valuable enough to shoot you to the top of their results pages.

Once upon a time, when you wanted to update web content, you would have had to either know how to write code or pay someone who did. These expensive and tedious hoops lead to a significant amount of stale content in cyberspace, which did no good for anyone.

Oh, how times have changed! With blogs and new products constantly freshening up the internet’s offerings, developers went to work creating the tool now known as the content management system (also commonly referred to as a CMS).

Thanks to the ingenious minds that came together to embark on the creation of the content management system, you are now free to alter your pages and update your content as you see fit. Each content management system that we use here at OTR will incorporate features that will enhance your experience as you navigate your way through your website.

These systems provide you with a way to securely and safely access your website from anywhere with internet access, and you can easily alter the design without needing any knowledge of coding. You’ll have the ability to archive and retrieve prior versions after revisions, in case your newest update isn’t exactly what you’re looking for.

The goal is easy usability — a place where your team and ours can come together to store your content in a version-controlled environment with pre-built features incorporated around your specific business needs. After all, captivating content should always be stored for safe-keeping.

At OTR, we work with you to understand where your business is now so we can choose the right content management system to get you where you want to go. Our Web Content Team is standing by and ready to strategize with your key people to make remarkable messages appear on your pages. Ready to learn more?

Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web, a web development company creating market ready websites since 2000, with locations in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

OTR Web is a Certified Partner with HubSpot and Google.

For all your Inbound Marketing and Website requirements

Contact OTR Web.

Inbound Marketing Consumers Empowerment Part 7

Posted on April 22, 2015 by ianotr

Inbound Marketing Consumers Empowered

Economic factors encourage customers to be researchers

The internet has represented consumer empowerment since the 1990’s because it operates like a high speed phone book. It takes you wherever you want to go, including to websites of competitors you just visited. Due to last century’s marketing that promised more than it delivered, consumers have become skeptical of unfamiliar brands, but are able to quickly learn about brands as a result of inbound marketing.

Marketing Affordability

One of the reasons many people use the internet is to learn how to save money. When budgets tighten, people intensify searches as “affordable” becomes an important keyword to attract bargain hunters. At the same time, many consumers are looking for the best quality at the lowest price. The internet is competitive because it gives you a lot of different choices quickly.

At physical stores consumers deal with extra problematic variables such as shelf space and number of units in stock. If a product sells out it can create inconveniences for customers. Online markets have eliminated the problem of store hours and inventories. Since many store costs have been reduced, online marketers can afford to sell products at lower prices than retail.

Accelerated Research

What consumers are really latching onto when they begin to have favorite blogs is a feeling of comfort that they have learned something from someone online. Surfing the net can take up a lot of time and sometimes there’s nothing to show for it. But engaging through social media and online discussions can generate a useful dialogue that builds loyalty and interest while saving time. For many people saving time is just as valuable as saving money.

Search engines have been such helpful time saving devices that they can instantly bring you in touch with any market imaginable through keywords. Searching for something online is not the same type of passive activity as sitting through TV commercials. In many ways TV advertising chases away customers while inbound marketing invites customers to participate with the product.

Lower Marketing Costs

One of the main keys to inbound marketing is that it helps make your brand a star in several categories instead of just one. The marketing of several different products under one brand name has become an incredibly powerful way to maximize marketing at lower costs.The more variety in products and services you can offer, the more visibility you will generate online and the more chances for customers to find you.

Imagine if you had a different brand name for every different product you sold. If you sold hundreds of different products it could cost a lot of money just to design each logo. But one brand that can be marketed hundreds of different ways is a much more economically efficient venture. In many cases brands are becoming about values related to visions of the world. People now value brands that share similar visions, such as going green.

The Value of Information

Thanks to search engines and inbound marketing, original information has become valuable. At one time marketing costs were high in order to have access to a big passive audience that wasn’t necessarily in the mood to buy. Now marketing costs are low to reach a big active audience that is already searching to buy. All it takes is effort on the part of the marketer to put these pieces together and connect with followers.

The road to becoming successful at inbound marketing involves placing value in stories about your products. Take the lead in inbound marketing by offering free information that helps others gain economic advantages and makes your site more valuable than sites with less information.

Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web, a web development company creating market ready websites since 2000, with locations in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

OTR Web is a Certified Partner with HubSpot and Google.

For all your Inbound Marketing and Website requirements

Contact OTR Web.

Inbound Marketing – SEO Part 6

Posted on April 15, 2015 by ianotr

Inbound Marketing – SEO

People want information, not persuasive ads

Consumers have naturally become more curious in the internet era about products before they buy them. Instead of the more expensive trial and error approach of learning over time which products meet specific needs, consumers can learn from other consumers quickly at no cost thanks to online reviews. In the 20th century consumers were generally quiet about products that didn’t deliver what the advertising promised, but in the new century there is much less room for error.

Product Information

The internet has elevated people’s awareness about the value of product information. Inbound Marketing should be combined with SEO thus devoting entire articles to specific products or services. Storytelling about products in blogs and articles has become a common form of content marketing. At the same time, consumers are learning to be more careful about how they spend money online. More people are using the internet to learn about products, even if they make purchases at physical stores.

At one time consumers weren’t expected to know a lot of product information, back when they were sold one size fits all packages prior to computers becoming mainstream. The computer revolution was part of what changed the consumer landscape, as consumers were expected to choose the variables of hardware and software. People now have a lot of brand awareness about various facets of the computer industry thanks to tech marketing turning common people into techies.

Avoiding the Hype

As the online community has become empowered to know sets of choices for almost any circumstance, online surfers try to maximize search time by avoiding links that do not produce desired results. The weakest web pages are the ones in which the intent was clearly marketing with minimal product information given. There should be a link to deeper information until you get to the product page.

Products no longer need outrageous slogans and taglines to get people’s attention. Now it’s easier to get people’s attention by being more relatable, using sensible SEO. The reason brands are expected to live up to their claims more than ever is that a different brand is always a click away. One of the main causes of people avoiding a brand is pushy sales.People now have many ways to quickly find many different alternative choices.A brand is powerful if it can explain itself using various media that can be instantly accessed.

One of the most evident trends in content marketing is to avoid any type of traditional sales approach. While the goal of traditional marketing was to develop sales leads and convert them as soon as possible, the goal of content marketing is more to nurture leads and worry about sales as they happen. More value is placed on individual relationships than whether or not someone has made a purchase.

The Rise of Blogging

Bloggers became important to the online community the same way DJs became important to the music community. Successful bloggers attract a big online following by sharing useful information. The most popular bloggers are considered “influencers” of other writers and users of social networks. Bloggers try to be early adopters of products to show followers that they are on the cutting edge. Getting your product covered by a popular blogger is free valuable advertising.

Search engines treat authoritative bloggers as priorities when it comes to search rankings, so part of the marketing strategy of a product is researching bloggers. Writing your own blog using SEO also carries more weight than a web page full of ads. Take the lead in content marketing by avoiding persuasive language and focusing on writing that acts more as a gateway to a learning experience.

Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web a web development company creating market ready websites since 2000, with locations in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

OTR Web is a Certified Partner with HubSpot and Google.

For all your Inbound Marketing and Website requirements

Contact OTR Web.

Content Marketing & SEO Part 5

Posted on April 8, 2015 by ianotr

Content Marketing & SEO

One size fits all marketing is ineffective

Traditional marketing relied on a theory that one message can connect with a mass audience. The internet helped branding become more multidimensional. Websites can be full of different versions of brands. The one size fits all model was designed to reach a vast market through a numbers game and limited media, but it did not always reach its target market. Today SEO has become a realistic way to develop a significant loyal online community.

Brand Diversity

One of the keys to business survival in the 21st century has been brand diversity. The internet has made it easy for a brand to become a package that serves a market with many different niches. By offering many different products instead of one product a brand potentially reaches a much wider market. Each version of a brand can have its own web page using keywords associated with the brand. One of the many reasons for creating many different brand versions is to offer the brand in different languages.

Brand diversity may imply that a conglomerate is the force behind the business, but small businesses can also be diverse. Using creativity, a local business may find reasons to market different product versions to different market segments. The more a brand can offer customization, the more personalized it is and the more it fits the model sought by modern consumers.

Research Beyond Demographics

In the 1990’s demographics played a huge part in the mass marketing of one size fits all products. By selling products to specific target demographics there was a consensus among marketers that everything came down to age groups. Then psychographics became part of marketing that expanded the thinking to include interests and lifestyles as important market factors besides age group. Tech gadgets have been marketed as lifestyle items, in which several different versions fit different lifestyles.

Ever since Google introduced Analytics, the marketing world has gravitated toward this tool and similar traffic tracking programs as a measurement of marketing power. Analytics take the marketer into a world of online behavior, which can reflect how well a website is presented. Now that markets can be studied on a micro level, thanks to SEO and web stats, it’s possible for a marketer of a brand to meet the needs of various markets.

Updated Products

Unlike last century’s products, this century’s products require much more frequent updating, especially when it has anything to do with digital products. One marketing message can no longer summarize a product in a way that meets the needs of modern consumers. Software, books, video games, music and blogs can all be updated seamlessly in the cloud. Even T-shirts can now be designed in the cloud.

Part of SEO involves updating web pages, as search engines favor fresh content. Authoritative blogs that are updated frequently carry heavy weight with search engines. The internet has helped expand the boundaries of branding, giving owners more flexibility in reaching niche markets. All you mostly have to do as a content marketer is write a useful article for each different market you are trying to reach.

Reaching Niches with Content Marketing

The secret to effective content marketing has always been to create unique and compelling content. The beauty of content marketing is it allows you to get indexed in search engines as much as possible when writing about the various niches associated with your brand. While last century’s marketers were mainly concerned with demographics, this century’s marketers have much more data and must think about customers more as individuals than statistics. Take the lead in content marketing by writing about various niches within your market.

Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web Solutions a web development company building marketing websites since 2000, with offices in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

OTR Web is a Certified Partner with HubSpot and Google.

For all your Inbound Marketing and Website requirements

Contact OTR Web.

Content Marketing vs Interruptive Marketing Part 4

Posted on March 4, 2015 by ianotr

Content Marketing vs Interruptive Marketing

Interruptive marketing annoys more than it helps

Interruptive marketing still exists online for those who can afford it. Since most people do not go online to click ads, online advertising should only be done when it makes sense and you have an idea how many people you will be reaching. It’s possible to create a successful campaign with interruptive advertising, usually after learning from failed campaigns.

Why Ads are Annoying

A big reason why interruptive ads continue to be annoying is that people have become more conscious of how time can get wasted, especially people who spend a lot of time watching television. Interruptive advertising on websites is forcing many users to move on to the next website faster, especially when it comes to trying to watch videos. Getting hit with an ad has become a two minute slowdown. Many times it’s easier to exit a website than wait for an ad to finish.

Since ads represent clutter, they are usually bothersome. Only once in awhile do ads communicate the way they were designed. Interruptive ads are starting to become hard to justify except in narrowly targeted situations. The problem with constantly interrupting people who don’t want to be interrupted is that it gets old. The person can also form a negative image of the brand if it is over-marketed.

Image Problems

We are moving into an era in which brands are considered phony if they don’t live up to their claims. It’s now easy to look up customer feedback for almost any brand, now that sites like Amazon keep track of consumer comments. Consumers are now conscious of giving such feedback sites weight compared with advertising. The rising popularity of content marketing is causing businesses to understand the negative impact of interruptive advertising.

Now that audiences have learned to see through advertiser claims, it’s becoming a challenge for businesses to win the trust of customers. Since content marketing is more about communicating with the target market, it makes sense to try to gain as much respect as possible by telling the truth than to exaggerate the facts just to trick people into sales. When people realize they’ve been fooled by advertising, it can damage association with the brand.

Less Like Radio

The irony about radio advertising is that it does the opposite of what it’s supposed to do. Instead of delivering a message to a mass audience, it’s delivering a message to people who have switched stations during commercials.In order to meet the standards of content marketing, it’s important to think of the opposite of how radio commercials have been made. Many commercials have used phony voices to try to give the spot more energy. Today’s marketing is closer to being conversational without theatrical characters.

Traditional radio commercials usually told you a limited amount of information to fit the format of a 30 or 60 second spot, whereas content marketing does not limit its message to the constraints of a third party. Radio commercials always get clustered with other commercials in “stopsets,” which is exactly when many people tune out of the radio. Clearly, most people do not listen to radio commercials no matter what the message is.

Another problem with radio commercials is due to the time constraint, many times the announcer will speed up his or her voice and speak too fast to be understood. If you watch business videos designed to raise brand awareness through content marketing, you will likely come across more relaxed than hyper presentations. Interruptive ads have become more annoying over time now that people have learned to use the internet as a quick gateway to many free activities.

Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web Solutions a web development company building marketing websites since 2000, with offices in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

OTR Web – Delivers What You Need With Style.

For all your Inbound Marketing and Website requirements

Contact OTR Web.