This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Summary
They are doing wonderful things with computers. But don't be like my dear old Aunt Minnie, sitting on the sidelines talking about what they are doing.
You need to get into the game. It's time to become a Millennium Marketer. Web analytics expert Avinash Kaushik, author of Web Analytics: An Hour a Day, tells marketers, "If you don't get the Web, you won't have a long future."
Extreme? Yes. But the fact is that the Web is no longer a great potential marketing tool. It is a great marketing tool—the potential is beginning to be realized, perhaps by your own competitors. As we've seen, the Web brings big changes to marketing as we know it:
- MarCom is becoming MarCon—Marketers who interrupt their customers to spew monologues are out. Marketing as conversation is in. What makes you someone your customers want to talk to? What makes you someone that your customers will say nice things about?
- Marketing segmentation is becoming marketing personalization—Web marketing makes it far easier to base market segments on needs rather than simple demographics and firmographics, and the Web lets customers segment themselves. Moreover, the Web allows segmentation to differentiate both the message and the product in ways not practical before. Do your customers feel like they get a personal message and a personalized product?
- We're all direct marketers now—The Web is one big direct marketing machine, and everyone is invited to the party. We can try anything, measure everything, and do it all over again 20 minutes from now based on what we learned. And we will change our culture from trying to be perfect from the outset to doing it wrong quickly.
Enough marketing philosophy! Let's dive right into what the Web has to offer. What are all those new Web marketing tactics with those funny names? Blogs and podcasts and wikis! Oh my! Check out Chapter 2 to find out what all this geeky stuff can do for your marketing.