The Evolved Marketing Model

I hear a lot of hand wringing about how marketers don’t know how to leverage the new media well. Agencies seems clueless or if they do understand new media they tend to “black box” it making it hard for the mortal marketer to follow what they mean and more importantly what results they think a marketer can reasonably expect.

So let’s demystify this “new media” thing (including viral marketing) with an evolved approach that is pertinent and practical.

Evolved marketing includes a well balanced portfolio of new media and old media. Largely new media is about tapping into the viral marketing phenomenon – web 2.0, social networking, blogging and keyword seeding and so forth.

The trouble is that viral marketing tactics tends to fall between the “agency cracks”. Traditional agencies haven’t a clue and PR agencies think of viral marketing as something they don’t really do because they are focused on getting pick-up in the New York Times.

Hence viral marketing is sort of like direct marketing was in the early 1990’s. Something advertisers played with but didn’t really take seriously.

Think again.

Evolved marketers are recognizing that viral marketing and public relations are evolving into something called PVR = public + viral relations. These functions are evolving into a singular function because the Internet is one big content serving engine with a heavy dose of direct response thrown in. Marketers need to tap into the paradigm shift if they want to understand how to evolve their marketing models. This new PVR model is executed via strategic “content campaigns” where marketers concentrate content creation and content distribution into a theme and drive that content within a timeframe across tactics – SEO, blogs, public relations and article distribution etc. Today, most marketers take a slio’d approach — the SEO agency optimizes keywords and the PR agency drafts release about whatever and the marcom agency suggests promotions. None of it working together – all of it sub-optimized.

So first evolve your thinking, then evolve your agencies’ thinking and you will evolve your results.

Judy Shapiro