Owen Frager is Chief Innovation Officer of the Frager Creative Group, and principal blogger at Frager Factor. One of the nation’s first virtual marketing communications agencies serving Fortune 500 brands, Frager Creative and Owen Frager prove every day that big agency creativity doesn’t have to come with big agency drawbacks — or costs.
There’s a lot more to interactive digital marketing than eye-catching banner ads, discount packages and clever domain names.
Marketing, has finally come into the industry. Marketing gives personality and differentiates for advantage. Marketing creates relationships with customers that go deeper than anything you sell or make. And of course, social marketing, yet to be mastered by most, facilitates those relationships and drives word of mouth.
2012 is the year that marketing rules to make one stand-out in a me-too online world.
Here are the highlights of my 10-Step Recipe for 21st Century Marketing Success.
- People don’t buy brands. They join brands.
Interactive marketing is about brand relevance and consumer involvement. So your challenge is to create a sense of identity or belonging. And fulfilling people’s expectations of what they will get in exchange for allowing you into their lives.
- What’s currently relevant is constantly changing.
Fortunately, the Web offers the unique ability to reach and bring together like-minded customers from all over the world.
- You can market to one life or all.
Any one prospect can be multiple customers: Business services decision-maker, luxury products consumer, grandparent, community leader. Green. Black. Gay.
- You can change to be what your customers need.
On the Web, you have the unprecedented opportunity to put on a different face to different communities or market segments.
- Connecting people to each other connects them to you.
On the Web, people search out and share marketing messages they fast forward through on TV. Combining traditional media with the power of the Web, you can turn transactions into relationships and transform your brand into something that people want to be a part of for the rest of their lives – and one generation to the next.
- Money can be made without selling anything.
The leadership position is still open on today’s most pressing issues. The socially responsible corporation, Web site or portal that creates a shared sense of common purpose will offer a legacy in providing everyone a place to record how the future is better for our having been here.
- Digital is how it all happens.
But digital marketing only delivers its promise when integrated into a larger marketing mix. It takes new thinking to take full advantage of the Internet’s potential.- Cross promotion that shares costs and extends budgets.
- Redirection of advertising dollars to collaborative efforts that raise awareness and sales.
- Ideas as themes, products, promotional vehicles and monetized resources.
The new model is collaboration, not competition.
