The differences between online and offline, and why the poor guy gets all the attention? #04
Navanee Viswa
Marketing professional | Principal at Peregrene - Full-stack marketing solutions | Speaks at Events about Marketing
In Civil Engineering anything you build is physical, tangible. You can literally see in front of your eyes, things getting built over a period of time and immediately, also in parts.
Starting from earthwork, you can see the pit being excavated, in the morning it was plain ground, after some time or by evening you can see there is a pit.?
You can see the steel rebars have arrived at the site and fabricated per design and erected to become a column - physical. You pour concrete after the formworks and see the column - physical.?
It is dope, it is highly rewarding to see, it gives the feeling of you building things. It’s motivational, it makes you go and build things over and over. The feedback loop is rewarding, mental incentives are super high, probably one of the most dope things on planet earth.?
This doesn’t end at the execution level - the architect, the designers, the management teams, the surveyors everybody in the line gets a small share of the project. They claim that this project is where I work, I have completed this project. It is dope because you can make people see it. It is because this field feeds the most innate feeling of human beings.?
------------
When it comes to marketing, the physical thing can happen only offline. That’s why hoardings, billboards, print ads, banners are there, it is physical, it is a very human thing to see, feel and perceive that it exists because it is real, it is there. That’s why few percentages of hoardings, print ads, banners stand tall and serve the purpose(Leave the FMCGs). Rest all are physical.
Things are diametrically opposite when it comes to online. The moment you turn off your screen, boom, it’s gone. Where was the beautiful world I saw a moment before? This is difficult to comprehend for the human brain.?
Online, layers of complications get opened up one after the other. First, you are convinced to get into digital, this happens because you yourself a consumer, you watch cinema, watch videos on YouTube, Netflix. The decision-maker understands this part quite well - we have to be part of digital.
Because of the superficial understanding and the way the human brain used to see things(physical) the next easiest thing for it to believe is online ads. The similarities you can see here from offline.?
Digital.
It is easy to get convinced that we are also digital because both have similarities.?
If someone talks about other than online ads, like content marketing there are some series of questions thrown by the decision-maker.?
Nothing deep, just red-herrings, pure denial of understanding online marketing.
Anything beyond this part, online is something really a few percentages of decision-makers ready to comprehend.
Marketing online is an activity of building a fan base for your brand who can buy from you or recommend someone to buy from you from their network.?
It is not difficult. you have been selling products, services for years, just bringing them all under a virtual space. Your only job is to help them understand more about your business, the solution you provide, the interaction you do with your fan base, educate them, entertain them.?
领英推荐
One simple baseline is “The more the fan base you build, the more business growth you get”?
This is possible only through creating content for your audience set. Not through paid ads.?
You can go ahead and remove most of your analytics part and focus on a few metrics that increase your fan base(A), you can see your business grow(B).? There will be a time lag between these two parts(A&B), depending on your business nature.?
So, you need to be ahead in creating content. Let say you start creating content and the reaction from your audience and fans reflects in the next 3 months. To make it a continuous affair, you have to create content on a continuous basis. You are 3 months ahead always.?
Cant, I stop creating content? Yes, it is possible after a few years, once you accumulated a few hundred blog posts, a few hundred videos, a few hundred ebooks, most importantly a decent fan base to make you sustain for the period you choose to stop creating content. Any continuously expanding business would rarely get to that point of stopping creating content.?
For some or other reasons, if you ever get to the point of stopping creating content, you can stop creating but don’t stop repurposing and distributing your content from the olds. Even when you stop creating content, you will get a reaction after 3 months only.?
These 3 months are arbitrary, some businesses will have a 1-month timeline between action and reaction. Some businesses may have a 1-year timeline between action and the reaction.?
→ Action is content creation(Yours)
→ The reaction is business growth(purchase ready Queries)
SUMMARY
Offline is physical, it’s real.?
Online split into two. Paid and content creation.?
Paid ads are equal to physical. It is almost real.
Online ads have similar characteristics to offline hence decision-makers bite, in spite of bringing abnormal underperformance.
In Online, marketing through content is beyond instant understanding. There is a time lag. Hence fewer people are ready to adopt it. In spite of all the content, they create, is going to work for them as their brand assets and is going to work for them almost perpetually in the digital world.?
Not only that, there are 1000s of brands that have grown up purely building their content repositories like video channels, blog sites and e-book repositories.
--------------------------
Thank you for reading. See you next Monday in another article. - Navanee Viswa.
"Marketing is Engineering" is a book that I’m currently writing. The tagline of the book is "Get out of the paid ads rabbit hole and do solid marketing using content to scale up in the connected world". This story or a portion of it may get a part of the book. Stay tuned, I’ll share more about the developments of the book here.
??Fuelling life with Anyo mobile app?? Creative Wellbeing Experiences Curator ?? Cocoon Artist ???? National Youth Awardee 2010 by Govt of India
3 年Another detailed piece from you that was useful. I could relate to the point where you said about the reaction you receive when you talk about content marketing. Fortunately many brands and businesses have started understanding why authentic content is necessary for growth. The bottom line of all is 'the time' you need to give, to build your content and the patience to track responses and create more content that your audience can relate to. To find that magical intersection.