Staying on top of marketing technology trends can be exhausting – but not all marketing has to take place online. By turning the marketing process into a cycle you can take a fresh look at some old ideas – and maybe find a novel way to reach your target person along the way.
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In today’s video, I talk about the cycle of marketing channels – and if you’re worried you might be a bit of a dinosaur when it comes to the latest marketing tools and technologies, I explain why that may be a good thing for your business.
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Marketing Needs to Be Novel
Marketing is all about getting yourself in front of people and getting them to notice you, and one of the best ways to achieve this is to offer something new – something novel.
Our brains are wired to notice when things are different – when things are new when things are not as we expect them to be – and they are also wired to completely ignore things when we expect them to be there, as we don’t have the capacity to absorb every single bit of information that’s thrown at us (which would be information overload!).
As a result, our brains are constantly sifting through the information around us to sort the important new things from the same old things we see all the time, taking notice of what we need to know and ignoring the rest. This tendency of the brain speaks to the very essence of marketing – it reinforces why it’s so important that your target person is able to see your USP so you can stand out from the crowd. If you want people to notice your business, your marketing needs to be novel.
Do You Need to Keep Your Finger ‘On the Pulse’?
One of the strongest ways to be novel in this digital age is to have your finger on the pulse – to know all the new technology, get onto channels that are not being used yet and see if you can be the first to dominate that space.
And yet, for some of us, it can be exhausting to follow the latest advances in technology and learn how to use them on the off chance that your target person will see your message. If after all your time and effort you miss the people you want to reach the most, or the technology doesn’t take off as you expected, then you’ve spent a lot of time learning something for nothing. Why not save your energy for something else?
Avoiding Banner Blindness to Maintain Marketing Effectiveness
Marketing works in a fairly consistent way:
- Something in your marketing picks up and gains traction.
- People start responding to it.
- Other people see that other businesses are using that approach/marketing channel effectively.
- Everyone starts using it!
The trouble with this process is that when everyone starts using it, people eventually start ignoring it because our brains think, “I’ve seen that before; I’m just going to start ignoring it.”
A really good example of this is ‘banner blindness’. Think about all the display banners you see on the internet. You can pay for Google Ads to display banners on websites that deal with particular interests, which is where you might hope to reach your target person. However, if people automatically filter out those banners because they know that they’re ads, you risk losing out on your investment because your target person has seen it all before. This is why Facebook has to keep changing up the way it shows its users advertising content – it needs to hold people’s attention.
Turning the Marketing Process into a Marketing Cycle
If a marketing channel loses its effectiveness, meaning people stop using the channel, this is where the marketing process can turn into a marketing cycle – you try something new, something novel, something different to reach your target person, which takes you back to the beginning of the process, helping you avoid the concept of ‘banner blindness’. But you don’t have to change from one technology to another – you could find a novel approach in older ideas that may not be in use any longer but still have the power to reach people.
A good example of this might be direct mail. Businesses used to send out enormous catalogues showcasing things you could buy from them, but direct mail marketing is far less popular these days. However, this means that the competition in that space is less than the competition in the email space where so many businesses target their customers. But this is just one example – there may be other, more retro, and appealing marketing channels that you might be able to get some really good results from because they’re not in use anymore.
Time to Get Creative and Embrace Your Inner Dinosaur
If you feel like you aren’t keeping up with today’s marketing trends, don’t panic! Instead, try sitting down and thinking about what might work for you and your business to help you find an alternative way to reach your target person. What marketing techniques really worked for you at the start of your career – or even when you were a kid? What marketing tools seemed to work once upon a time but aren’t being used anymore? You may find that you can create a whole new marketing channel for your business by dusting off some tried-and-tested old-school favourites.
If you’d like to talk through your marketing ideas to help you reach your target person, please do get in touch – I’d love to help you out.