Published on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 by Ian Mackenzie
Illustration by Haley Fiege
“Give the consumer more than they paid for.”
Words to live and die by from Seth Godin at the recent Art of Marketing conference in Toronto. They also remind me of my first foray into blogging – and why I think blogs are one of the most underused ad formats going.
Come back with me to October 11, 2006. That’s the day I started a blog for a small, Toronto-based independent theatre company called Praxis Theatre. We were as relatively unknown as the next small, Toronto-based independent theatre company. As the new Director of Marketing, it was my job to change that.
Within a year of starting that blog, the discipline of frequent posting had helped us find a true and compelling brand voice. Within two years, both The Globe and Mail and Time Out New York had permanent links to our site. We were being regularly quoted in the Guardian UK. Pretty much every wired independent theatre artist in Toronto knew our name. And our shows were selling out.
Not bad for a media buy of $0.
You’ve probably never heard of Praxis Theatre. That’s fine. We weren’t talking to you. We measured our readers in the hundreds – not millions. But they were the right hundred.
This was an industry so focused on survival that there were few players willing to stand up and use their limited marketing bandwidth to talk about “the competition.”
We took that vacuum as an opportunity and started providing the service for free – in the form of interviews, guest posts, photo essays and guided discussions. The blog was a mirror to the community with our logo in the corner, and our consumers interpreted it as “authenticity.”
Now as an agency copywriter, I spend much of my time populating paid media with traditional product benefit messages: “Our product is great!” “Click here!” “Buy now!” “On sale!” “WIN!”
That stuff works. Sure. Especially when the products and offers are good. But because there’s often no greater purpose to the message than a push to buy, the ads themselves miss an opportunity to contribute to a greater good.
That’s a shame. It makes our industry look shallow, our clients opportunistic, it squanders natural resources, and it clutters valuable media space with junk messaging.
In this sea of low-value messages, good branded blogs have an opportunity to up the value proposition for the consumer.
Here’s the downside: “Blog” rhymes with “slog.” Good blogs require time, vision, resources and patience. And the results are often vague and intangible – a hard sell against an offer-driven newspaper ad.
But in an age when search is rapidly becoming your consumers’ entry point to your brand, a well-executed blog can help you own the competitive landscape even before that landscape has been defined.
Want proof? Type “consumer: unplugged” into Google. (To give an arbitrary example.) The second result is for Grip Limited, an advertising agency. They own that search result, and many others, because they’ve got a good blog.
How valuable is it? Only time will tell. But my hunch is that authenticity, quality consumer-facing content, and high search ranking are well on their way to becoming marketing gold.
So . . . this blog post has been an ad for Applied Arts, Praxis Theatre, Ian Mackenzie and Grip Limited.
I hope you got more from it than you paid for.
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Ian Mackenzie is a Toronto-based marketer and copywriter at Grip Limited.
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