With so many online tools and channels, it can be very difficult to decide where to start and which ones to focus on. What makes any one online marketing tool relevant to you?
Most don’t actually start out that way…
- At first, it’s so new that few marketers know what to really do with it. Twitter was a good example: 140 character long “tweets” about where you’re having lunch or which movie you just saw? At first, its marketing value wasn’t quite clear.
- But then, some really creative people figure out how to use it to expand their reputations online and connect with new prospects and clients. As this happened, its cost-effectiveness (time invested, not just money) goes straight up. This is the online marketing sweet spot.
- Unfortunately, once marketers discover something, more competitors start saturating the channel and raise the cost to compete. End users start to get sick of all the noise, or just get bored with it altogether, and jump on to the next best thing. We’re seeing this with email today. Spam nearly killed it as a viable marketing option, and although it’s still a critical part of any online marketing campaign, it’s definitely past its prime. People block out so much of their incoming mail while at the same time companies like Facebook and Twitter have shifted how people communicate with their friends and coworkers.
- Which leads to the last step: the death plunge into obsolescence (remember Friendster?).
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