The Internet is marketing’s renewable energy source. After all:
What is a website if not a type of marketing solar panel set out to collect attention?
What is a viral video if not a wind turbine propelled by the collective excitement of people who want to share your content?
What is a Facebook FAN page if not a sort of geothermal system that taps into your most loyal brand FANS’ energy?
Proprietary Audience Development is built upon these renewable sources of audience energy. Instead of “paying at the pump,” you build your own audiences to propel your growth. Individuals may opt-out, dislike, or stop following your brand over time. But engaging in ongoing Proprietary Audience Development efforts allows you to constantly add new consumers who are eager to hear from your company. To better understand this concept, let’s examine the market for baby products.
Babies—or more specifically, their parents—are a renewable source of marketing energy. That first baby may stop using formula, but there’s a good chance another will be on the way. And if not, then another new set of parents will be in the market for formula again soon. If you’re a brand like Enfamil baby formula (@Enfamil), you understand this. You therefore concentrate on capturing the attention of those fresh, new parents through a website, great search engine optimization (SEO), email, Facebook, Twitter, and other direct online channels. And when their baby no longer needs your products, you cycle those parents out of your direct marketing efforts.a
Consumer energy (i.e., interest in your product) can shift quickly; it’s driven by forces such as age, career, convenience, health, income, interests, life stage, and location. Our companies cannot control these changes; therefore, we must be constantly seeking to replenish our renewable, proprietary audiences with new members. And therein lies the rub: We cannot depend solely on fossil fuel advertising or renewable Internet marketing to fuel our companies. We must embrace a hybrid marketing approach.
Audience Exercise #2: Desert Island Tactics
One of my favorite questions to ask marketers is this: If you could use only five tactics to grow your business, what would they be?
Inspired by the long-running BBC Radio show (@BBCRadio4), Desert Island Discs, the question gets you focused on the tactics that generate business—not just headlines. So—what are your five “Desert Island Tactics” and why? Which ones require you to pay for audiences versus building your own? Now go ask your marketing colleagues the same question, and let the debate begin!
The Hybrid Marketing Era
When Motor Trend (@MotorTrend) named its 2013 Car of the Year, car enthusiasts found themselves face to face with the first winner in the award’s 64-year history not powered by an internal combustion engine—the all-electric Tesla Model S (@Tesla). Motor Trend itself called the car a “shocking winner” and “proof positive that America can still make great things.”7 That great thing, as it turns out, is a luxury sedan that seats seven and can go 265 miles on a single charge.
The Tesla Model S may be a glimpse at the future—one in which we are far less dependent on fossil fuels and increasingly powered by sustainable energy sources. That future sounds great, but I’m not blind to the truth; the all-electric Model S must be plugged in to charge, and that electricity comes straight from the coal-fired, fossil-fuel-burning electric grid. While the Model S may not technically be a hybrid car, its energy sources most certainly are—electricity from fossil fuels and renewable energy generated while driving.
And that’s okay. The Model S doesn’t have to solve all of the world’s energy problems. It’s enough that it is a step toward a more energy-efficient future.
We could say the same about Proprietary Audience Development. There’s no way we’re going to solve all of our marketing needs overnight. We simply face too many unknowns as to how consumer technologies, channels, and behaviors will evolve as they mature. But we do know a fundamental truth about marketing that will never change:
Proprietary audiences are a renewable source of energy that any business can develop.
So . . . what if instead of worrying whether we should pour more money into offline or online media, we concentrated on making them work better together? One way we can accomplish this is to ask our advertising to do more than just sell. We need to ask it to also help build our email SUBSCRIBERS, our engaged Facebook FANS, our influential Twitter FOLLOWERS—all of our proprietary audiences wherever they congregate now or in the not-too-distant future. This is the higher calling of hybrid marketing embodied in The Audience Imperative. Let’s take a look at its directives once again: