What does marketing means?
Speaking with other marketers they are often just talk about advertising. Studying economics I was told it’s about product, price, place and promotion.
Today we say it’s about building the right customer experience. which includes products, services and communication as the main parts.
Communication is much more than advertising. As a brand we need to build up an integrated and on an 1:1 base customer focused communication.
A brand is clapping on his own shoulder and telling that he is the best. That’s what it was in the past. In future a brand needs to understand each customer and predict his next step / needs. Then he needs to guide him through his individual journey.
If I am BMW I need to identify potential car buyer and guide them through their process. Delivering the right information at the right time is what everyone is telling these days. This is for sure right…. but would you trust information from BMW or more the same information from a 3rd party resources like a magazine? The answer is clear, Now it’s a challenge for BMW to understand each person, predict his needs and guide him through his journey… this by making sure that he is reading the right content which is more BMW friendly than Mercedes because this new technology is for example just BMW offering right now.
What I described is filtering 3rd party content by promoting this instead of setting up own advertising. BMW can use static content to do so or use 3rd party content to build dynamic content (filtered article). So let’s do SEA for example and don’t target the BWM website, let’s target a press article somewhere else.
You would now say that’s surreptitious advertising and you are right. This is surreptitious advertising on a 1:1 base without showing the brand
Let’s build a strategy how to steer 3rd party content in the customer journey to build a customer experience.
What we will see is a journey and a new dimension of content marketing. We all know the sentence “content is king” and are more or less annoyed of it. If content is king, then content distribution is king kong.
To sum it up. A brand should focus more and more on 3rd party content distribution on a 1:1 base and use his traditional marketing channels for this instead of placing his own marketing (advertising) materials there.
