The New Media Paradigm and the Relationships that come with it

by Julie Burgmeier

I get asked often “Is print advertising dead?” or “How much of our ad budget should still be allocated to print?”  For my own brick & click (storefront and e-commer site), over the past 4 years I have dropped print advertising down to the bare minimum – yellow page ads.  If it wasn’t for my relationship with the sales rep, I wouldn’t even be buying those.  First, she is cool and secondly the profit I make on her personal purchases when she comes to visit me equals what I pay for the ads.  I can’t say no.  Many larger organizations have strong relationships with their sales reps.  These relationships, along with the lack of structure for content marketing, can make moving from the traditional marketing strategies to content marketing challenging. 

Traditional advertising channels – tv, newspapers, magazines – depended on relationship selling.  The media buyer had demographics but did not (and still does not) have anything close to google analytics for measuring ROI (return on investment).  Mel Karmazin, then C.O.O of Viacom (past employee of mine and owner of CBS, Paramount, MTV, Simon & Schuster, etc, etc) back in 2003 was looking for a partnership with Google to keep up with thejJones (AOL and Time Warner) and to compete in an old-and-new-media kind of way.  Karmazine, speaking of selling Super Bowl commercials for 2.5 million dollars said, “You don’t want to have people know what works.  When you know what works or not, you tend to charge less money than when you have this aura and you’re selling this mystique.” (The New Yorker 10/12/2009)  Once I started buying adwords and using analytics, I couldn’t justify to myself or to my clients to continue to invest in traditional advertising channels. 

For internet/content marketers, relationship selling takes on an entirely new meaning.  Copyblogger has gone as far to say that relationships are the #1 pillar of online marketing success.  However, instead of the traditional relationships media sales reps have developed with clients in the past, content marketers are now building relationships with an entire audience of consumers.  The content marketer is taking the place of the traditional media partner.  Word of mouth by viral marketing is filling the shoes of traditional advertising.  Because consumers first instinct now involves a search engine, an organizations most important marketing investment is a web site that provides the consumer with the best content – relevant & compelling – which will be on the first page of the search.  In order for this to happen, organizations need to have a completely different outlook on their marketing strategies and budget allocations. 

 I’m currently reading “Get Content-Get Customers” by Joe Pulizzi and Newt Barrett.  They address “How to develop a set of processes that will enable you to create, de ploy, and replicate effective content marketing strategies throughout your organziation” along with many other aspects of content marketing.  A great read so far!