Putting the Bowling Ball in Front of the Bowler

Gone are the days where, as a marketer, you can rely on pasting an advertisement somewhere and hoping you’ll reach your desired audience. Gone are the days where television viewers had to sit anxiously through the commercials and be exposed to the desired content. There is DVR. There are subscription services.

With the internet, there are millions of websites fighting one another. It’s more important than ever to put the right product in front of the consumer.

A trend throughout these posts will be the consistent reminder that digital media, whether mobile or in the traditional sense, is the current and certainly the future marketing landscape. It is more affordable than traditional means of advertising, more user-friendly which means more businesses can control their marketing on their own, and farther reaching.

As this infograhpic shows, the trend is anything but a fad.

Infographic from Infosys

 The more people connected, the more companies are going to flock to the sources of those connections to try and get customers. With the ease of digital advertising as mentioned before, there is very much an over-saturation in just about every market where there are digital brands.

Retail. Wal-Mart. Target. Sears. Kohls. Macy’s. JCPenney’s. K-mart. Amazon.

Music. iTunes. Spotify. Wal-Mart. Target. Amazon.  Slacker radio.

Electronics. Best Buy. Wal-Mart. Target. Amazon. Sears. eBay.

Those were spontaneous examples but one thing is certain: huge retail chains have large market shares in eCommerce, and what they don’t have, is swallowed up by the digital-only behemoths like Amazon. For smaller private businesses, or mid-market niche chains, competing directly with these large foes will spell only disaster. Mass production trumps any other possible advantage.

Except for one. Target marketing.

There is not a necessity to compete with the large retailers if you’re able to efficiently target your specific market. Localized promotions, specified search engine optimization targeting precise keywords and tags for your market, networking with possible related interests to encompass reaching preferred target even if they don’t expect it.

It’s about knowing your customer, knowing their behaviors, their desires, and then putting your message where they’re going to be.

No Flying Cars, or Time Machines, but Technology & Digital Media are ahead of its Time

In a world where most people are connected to all things digital in every facet of their lives, it is increasingly important for marketers to stay up on, and aware of, any and all trends that may cropping up across the digital media landscape. Why is it important to be able to pick and assess and utilize any marketing trend that’s pumping ahead with life? Competition, competition, competition. It’s easier, and more affordable, than ever for brands to attempt to garner more market share which leads to an over-saturation in any one marketplace.

While the purchasing and marketing power continues to veer toward the side of the consumer, it hasn’t quite left the grips of brands yet.

As mashable shows with a list of 44 new digital media resources you may have missed, as other fields continue to throttle ahead and thrive in emerging digital medias, so too, does the field of marketing.

From consumers who live on their smart phones for everything from texting friends, to facebooking, to tweeting, to shopping, and even gaming, to consumers who prefer to do all that from the comfort of their couch through their HDTV, to the consumer who still prefers to shop and interact digitally through a trusty desktop computer, it is vital to be able to reach all of them. And more importantly than that, in today’s marketplace, it has to be personalized to them, without them even knowing or choosing it.

With the shift toward all things digital, one of the largest gains from the move is the ability to collect and analyze an unimaginable amount of information about our consumers in an almost immediate amount of time. Emerging media has created a vast amount of tracking and analysis programs to be able to pick up on trends and patterns in consumer’s shopping and browsing data to predict and present an ad that has a high probability of being of interest to them. It’s wild, when you really think about it.

And as a movie referenced more than once as I’ve seen with regards to the discussions around emerging digital media, but definitely worth another mention, Minority Report really exemplifies the underlying message and idea behind this blog moving forward. Here is a movie, made in 2002 and set in 2054, that shows a future where everything is slick and silver and advertisements are personalized to your tastes. It’s only been eleven years since that crazy future came to be!

Eleven. Years.

Changing digital ads based on the passer-by.