Groundhog Year: Are you stuck in the same marketing loop?

• Feb 4th, 2013
• online marketing & advertising

What if you lived the same year over and over again?

What if you lived the same year over and over again?

What if that year was, like, 2003?

Picture it: You wouldn’t do any online marketing. After all, companies, not customers, still control the marketing landscape.

Your website can just lie there, closing its eyes and thinking of England, instead of working hard with inbound content that pulls in traffic and attracts qualified leads.

You can spend your marketing budget on hidebound, outbound paid media, because in 2003, push still works, so why pull?

You can still expect consumers to meet you halfway in the marketing discussion, by faxing requests or calling your 800-number or filling out BRCs.

You can bypass search marketing and SEO, because they haven’t been invented yet.

And while you’re blissfully living your Groundhog Year, do you know what your competitors are doing?

Eating your lunch, that’s what.

They’re ramping up to Marketing 2013, where the customer is now fully in charge of the marketing discussion. When it begins. Where it begins. And how it proceeds.

Your competitors realize that consumers won’t spend any more effort than a Google search and a click or two to find or engage with marketers.

So they’ve already gotten into search marketing and SEO to pull people to their sites.

They’re using social media to jump-start consumer conversations, and brand relationships.

When people find their websites, your competitors are bribing them with content marketing—freebies like a thought-leadership white paper or other content, which they typically outsource to professionals to develop for them.

Oh, so you want to flip the calendar page? You’re done with “I Got You Babe” and Ned Ryerson? You seek the marketing equivalent of waking up next to Andie MacDowell?

Then you’ve got some work to do, don’t you? 2003 called. They want their groundhog back.