The AdNews NGen blog: How to make friends in business

You know those moments in life when you’ve got someone hassling you on the street to try and sell you something? If you’re anything like me, you find it annoying and I certainly don’t appreciate being interrupted when minding my own business. I don’t like being sold to by a message that’s not relevant to me much in the same way I don’t like pages being cluttered when I’m trying to read something. This might be a pessimistic view but we as media buyers essentially trade in interruption based messaging and our job is to minimise this disruption by placing an ad where it will annoy the least amount of people. Should this pervasive method of messaging still be the predominant approach to be heard?

The golden rule of influencing people: 'Seek first to understand, then be understood'.* As marketers, our role is to essentially alter peoples’ behaviour, I believe that we could do this more effectively by taking a value-added approach. Doesn’t it make sense to get on a customer’s side and build trust before we try and sell them one of our client’s widgets? When you think about the way we push a message out on the web, we’re forgetting that it’s not just another medium to reach people, but an opportunity start a conversation and be found.

Let’s work through a few hypotheticals so you can see where I’m coming from - say we were briefed to target 14-17 year old girls with $200k. We could buy impressions on the most relevant site possible, hope for a fantastic click-through rate of 1% and still be limited to its number of unique browsers. On the other hand, we could have a conversation with our target demo, discover what they love and hire a group of five Justin Bieber lookalikes to sing and moonwalk on camera to potentially amass millions. A distractingly comical example perhaps, but a principle that I believe carries merit - to reverse engineer virality and create a compelling asset to permanently generate leads.

If we wanted to target tech-focused small to medium businesses we could outsource and build a niche tech and social media blog focused on sale generating strategies. The branded and editorially integrated blog would attract a pre-qualified relevant audience and might even become a part of a user’s weekly reading. What if our client shared an insight that our W35-54 demo loved to eat out? A co-branded user generated platform reviewing restaurant specific dishes would be a great way to add value and build a community that trusts your brand. 

Consumers are spoilt for choice in this digital age and they don’t care where content comes from as long as they find it valuable. I’m excited to witness rapid evolution in the direction of the industry to offer more capability in the creation of relevant, sharable and ‘remark-able’ content to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes. As marketeers, we’re ultimately in the business of influencing people and I believe that there is great opportunity to increase effectiveness by adding value and building a relationship first.

Edwin Onggo
Mindshare

*Source: Stephen Covey of ‘7 Habits of Highly Effective People’ fame