WebProWorld
I’m racing headlong to age fifty, but some days I feel older than others. Lately I have been feeling oh-so-twentieth-century whenever someone talks about marketing campaigns in virtual worlds, such as Second Life. I admit it. I just don’t get it.
I’m not saying that virtual worlds aren’t important. I’m not even saying that marketing in virtual worlds won’t go on just as it does in the real world.
What I don’t get is the kind of marketing that we’re doing in virtual worlds.
Old-style marketing wasn’t easy, but at least we knew how to do it. If we wanted to buy TV ads or print ads, we hired some creative people—or even a whole ad agency’s worth. If we wanted to do publicity, we hired a PR person. Whatever kind of marketing you wanted to do, you could just hire an expert.
Times have changed.
I recently read John Reese’s PDF announcing the launch of his new Income.com site. In the PDF he talks about how competitive internet marketing will become in the coming 5 years, and stated what are the two main ingredients to large sustainable profit in that type of marketplace. The first is on the concept of optimization:
In these days of email marketing, social networking, and other new millennium selling tools, it’s good to see that old fashioned direct marketing still exists. When I retrieved my mail today, I found an intriguing package that looked like a slightly lumpy Express Mail delivery.
In many formats price is just used to filter out some of the noise, and an item is priced so low remind people it has some value, but allow it to spread fast.
Good marketing comes in two forms, not one. There is marketing that is relevant, appears at the right time to the right people and is likely to influence actions. This is the kind of marketing that everyone in the industry strives for. It’s what we think is good.
(I’m at EconSM today.)
I read Tom Foremski’s post, "Is search broken?" over a month ago, and I responded at the time by comparing the work you do for search with other ways of getting attention. But I keep thinking about the question Tom asked, and I think I have a better answer today than I did back then.
I’ve spoken ad nauseum about how we have to stop obsessing about carefully, slowly, deciding the exact right way to do our marketing. It’s comforting to believe that you have it right, but it’s an unattainable dream—you never have it right.
I came across some awesome benchmark data about B2B marketing budgets, courtesy of SiriusDecisions. (If you are not familiar with SiriusDecisions, you should be — they are doing some of the best research available on B2B marketing and sales.)
