An Organic Alternative to Cropdust Marketing

Budget Strategy and ROI (Part 2 of 6)

This series asks the tough questions about evolving marketing strategies and the benefits and returns you should expect and plan for.

If somebody told you that you could reach nearly every potential customer directly, engage them meaningfully, and spend less money, would you do it?

And what if that somebody were your 2010 Marketing Budget Manager?

Marketing looks different

Face the facts: this lower-budget-higher-benefit strategy can be accomplished with existing technologies, however disparate. And while the strategy to do it may not look like marketing as you know it, the money you make will still smell like money.

And no, there’s no magic one-size-fits-all solution. Neither SEO nor SEM, nor any of their cheeky little cousins, can take care of everything.

In fact, the broad-based, cropduster-style marketing that you’ve done in the past (low returns and all) results in the exact opposite of the goals above. Here is a chart to help you see why and how.

For best results, reach a targeted audience with highly engaging content

Customer engagement

In the chart above, the horizontal axis is customer engagement. Lowest means you get ignored or used for pulling gum off a shoe. Highest means that customers are digesting, sharing, and raving about your content. They buy into your content, they buy into your brand.

The definition of high engagement is important. It is not explicitly equal to ROI. High engagement is a crucial phase of the sales pipeline, but it’s not necessarily the spigot.

And in the context of your entire 2010 marketing scheme, the resulting sales pipeline will look less like straight pipe and more like the piping you’d expect to see underground on any given city block. It will cover many different types of domiciles (customers), because you have custom fitted your piping to meet each customer group’s specifications.

Your audience

The vertical axis is your audience. Do you catapult marketing grapes at an unsuspecting crowd hoping they’ll catch them in their mouths? Because if that’s your plan, the only customers you’ll get are the yawners. You want to feed your marketing content one by one to your audience, meeting individual preferences and needs. You want targeted — not broad — audiences in 2010.

You can accomplish this by creating digital profiles. Speak to your audience with the right voice and in the right contexts.

In practical terms, where do you plan to stop spending in 2010? Where will you halt your grape catapult?

Conversely, where are you going to start spending? If jarts were still legal, onto whose lawns would you be throwing them on January 2, 2010? Where are you going to distribute your content grapes?

The takeaway — too many metaphors?

If you don’t answer these questions soon, you may be left with a marketing city block full of sour grapes and bad sewage problems. Think about it.

If this post has too many metaphors to follow, consider how many more metaphors it’ll take to speak the languages of narrowcast, personalized content. That’s the work of 2010. Start planning … and practicing your metaphors.

My questions to you

What wasteful, broad-based spending will you stop in 2010? Where will you start spending? Is an online content marketing strategy wisely on your radar?

About the author

Andrew Davis -

In 2002, Andrew founded Tippingpoint Labs with journalist James Cosco. Since then, he's spent countless hours exploring the online universe and building a methodological approach to developing digital strategies that drive revenue or reduce costs.

Andrew's always asking big questions and analyzing data to understand markets, online forces and even business models. Andrew's research has resulted in the creation of innovative online metrics including Online Brand Value and Category Brand Value, eye-opening graphical representations of website evolution through the New Media Life Cycle and even using online data to predict offline revenue.

When he's not surfing the web, Andrew's traveling the globe speaking to a wide-variety of audiences about everything from social media to the future of print. Andrew is a frequent contributor to the Tippingpoint Labs website and has been creating valuable content since the early 1990s for The Jim Henson Company, CNN, The Today Show and MTV.

He's contributed to a book of short stories, called The Way Things Were and produced and co-wrote Roadside Ambition a documentary film about one small town with two huge balls.

"In a world where content is consumed as rapidly as it's created, companies need to develop a sound strategy to creating valuable online experiences that can, and should, be leveraged enterprise-wide. There is a content solution to every business challenge."