Mass marketing is no longer an long-term strategy

Mass vs. Targeted Marketing

In the era of a bombardment of messages via multiple mediums, taking a customer-focused interactive approach is the way to building and sustaining a brand.   By making a customer, consumer, partner feel like you care about what they want, you have better chances of having them spread the message for you.   “Mass marketing is no longer a long-term strategy,” said Adam Sarner, research director at Gartner, an analyst firm. “Mass-marketing campaigns have a 2 percent response rate and are on the decline, whereas by 2015, digital strategies, such as social and mobile marketing, will influence at least 80 percent of consumers’ discretionary spending.”

Sarner said that this means marketing strategies need to be fundamentally rethought.

“Marketers still need to shift their traditional campaign management strategy around executing campaigns to a customer and move toward a digital marketing, two-way engagement approach,” he said.

Gartner analysts said that this evolving customer-focused strategy harnesses digital techniques and channels that will increase engagement, response and conversion rates.

“The Internet was built on the idea of users collaborating,” Sarner said. “Once the Internet was commercialized, collaboration was overshadowed by transactional commerce and push-type marketing techniques that focused on one-directional hard sells. Today, activity on the Internet has shifted back to its roots in interaction and participation. The hard sell isn’t working in this new environment, and successful campaign management strategies have shifted from interruptive push, toward two-way conversations and addressing mutually beneficial approaches to customers’ wants and needs, which a digital marketing approach can provide.”

The online environment continues to expand, and marketing organizations have more opportunities to be effective. By 2014, 6.7 billion devices will be connected to the Internet. Mobile marketing in the U.S. reached $877.2 million in 2010, up 138 percent from the $368 million spent in 2009. The developing social CRM application market reached $600 million in 2010, and it is expected to reach $1 billion by 2013.

Isn’t it about time you started giving the people what they wanted instead of just giving them what you want to give them?