Don't Blink or Your Marketing Will Disappear

Anyone who has ever taken a Journalism class remembers at least some of the rules for what makes a story newsworthy: impact, timeliness, prominence, proximity, uniqueness, conflict, and currency. Marketers use similar tactics to cut through the clutter and gain awareness in the marketplace--with major areas of focus being timeliness, proximity, relevance and uniqueness.

Examples include:
- Timeliness: During 5 o'clock drive time, the radio plays a commercial for new dinner options at a local grocery store. What a coincidence, you were just thinking about what to have for dinner.
- Proximity: You are driving in a new town and see a billboard for a hotel three miles down the road. Great, you needed a place to stay and it is nearby.
- Relevance: You are a first-time parent, and you just received a baby store catalog in the mail. A year ago, you would have tossed it; now, you are going to buy half the items in it.
- Uniqueness: You normally never click on a banner ad, but this one was too intriguing to pass up. You had never seen an ad "walk" across your screen before, and it caught your attention enough to make you want to find out more.

Okay the last one may be a bit of a stretch, but you get the idea. Usually there is some combination of these factors behind marketing strategies. If we are trying to sell beer, we will try to have unique, eye-catching advertisements at the football stadium before, during and after the game. We will tie this into our integrated television, radio and online campaign. And boy, will it be different than every other beer campaign out there.

However, things are shifting due to the transience of online marketing, and the rise of the importance of timeliness, or more appropriately "recency." A billboard, television or print campaign used to last more than a few seconds. Now in the age of Social Media, recency is taking on an even greater importance. Yes, we follow and "fan" brands that are relevant to us, but everything comes and goes at lightning speed. A recent study reports that fewer than 1% of Tweets actually get seen because they are simply pushed down the page by every other Tweet. Suddenly, "posted 24 minutes ago" becomes a really long time.

Recency also weighs heavily in the online phenomenon of social promotion services such as LivingSocial and Groupon, which focus on providing amazing bargains that are only valid for a day and become free if you forward it to three friends who also buy. I had considered buying flying lessons for my husband last week, but by the time I made my decision it had already expired. So, not only do marketers need to act quickly but consumers do too.

Try finding a Friend's post from two days ago on Facebook. This has led them to add a "Top News" to the original "Most Recent" option. So brands not only have to make sure their posts are relevant and unique, they also have to think of new ones every 1.4 seconds (or at least hourly).

A few months ago, I attended the Digital East show for digital marketers like myself, and during the social media talk, someone said that organizations have to match their human resources with their content resources to determine the best social strategy for themselves. I am finding that many companies may want to set up social media accounts, but it is very difficult to staff them with someone who maintains a continual presence for their brands on these mediums. It makes me wonder how many abandoned Twitter accounts there will be in a few years, just like the blogs from 2008 and SecondLife accounts that haven't been used in years (wow, I had to make sure SecondLife was still in business, and it is).

A colleague recently brought up a good point that all of the "last seen" focused marketing actually presents an opportunity for the smaller businesses. Coca-cola used to use a strategy that was basically, "There will be a Coca-Cola within arm's length of you whenever your body and mind need refreshment." This pervasiveness or ubiquity was fine for the huge companies of the world, but all of the rest of the world couldn't compete. Now, recency has levelled the playing field a bit. Brands don't have to be everywhere. They just have to be at the right place at the right time with the right consumer. This is why online, social, search and mobile marketing are so exciting to marketers--especially small- to medium-sized and local businesses.

While recency is the emerging "Super Pillar" right now, I think we will see a shift in the next year or so to the rise of mobile marketing and the importance of proximity. Yes, the mobile gurus have been speaking about proximity marketing for years (with the favorite example being, "Walk by a Starbucks and get an ad and coupon on your cell phone"). However, the rise of smart phones and iPads are making mobile apps, mobile websites and text messaging much more pervasive. And, as we all know: where there are consumers, there is marketing.