We live in a connected world. From desktop computers to laptops and smartphones, it is now rare not to be able to check email, surf the web, collaborate on projects. Air travel used to be one of the few safe havens, where you could get a few hours of downtime uninterrupted by spam, text messages or voicemail - but the airlines are working to 'fix' that, too.
When you look back, the rapidity with which communications and computing have evolved is staggering. After all, it was only sixty years ago that the first commercial computer was developed - before that, true computers were science-fiction. What was the first email, as we would recognise it today, was sent forty years ago; and the first IBM PC, the ancestor of all the PCs we use today, came along just thirty years back. That's three years before Mark Zuckerberg was even born.
And now we have smartphones; RIM launched the Blackberry in 2002, Apple unleashed the iPhone in 2007, and the first Android phone arrived a year later. Devices with the kind of computing power that would have required a high-end desktop machine a couple of decades ago are now pocket-sized, and affordable enough for schoolkids to have them.
With ever-increasing computing power has come the ability to move data at ever greater speeds. Back in 1981 Hayes introduced the Smartmodem; for $299 it used an ordinary phone line to achieve speeds of - wait for it - 300 bits per second. That's bits, not bytes - reckon on 30 characters a second, so sending just this paragraph would take more than ten seconds. And it tied up the phone line while doing so.
Nowadays it's not uncommon for homes to have always-on, multi-megabit connections, while even smartphones have data connections which would leave the fastest phone-based modems far behind. Movies can now be rented online, without the inconvenience of actually visiting a store or waiting for a disc to arrive in the mail. The new Google Music service promises to make our music available to us anywhere, stored in 'the cloud' and streamed to wherever we may be.
Why am I telling you all this? Because it's important, because it has revolutionised marketing - and because it hasn't stopped. Rewind twenty years and you had a small number of mostly inflexible channels - print ads, TV and radio commercials, direct mail. They were generally expensive, it was difficult to target specific groups and tough to measure their effectiveness. Those options are all still out there, but they have been joined by a plethora of alternatives. Direct mail can now be sent by email; most businesses have their own websites, with many using them for ecommerce. You can buy advertising on other websites, or sponsor email newsletters; you can place ads on Google and Facebook, and target them with remarkable precision based either on search keywords or user demographic.
The online methods are also measurable; you can figure out how people reached your website, how many people clicked on your ad, which search word combinations are proving effective. Split testing can help you determine what email subject line generates the most responses, which special offers drives the most traffic. And you can get this feedback quickly, giving you opportunities to react and maximise the effectiveness of your efforts.
Of course, all of this comes at a price - complexity. It takes time to get an understanding of all the options, to develop a plan on what to do, to set all of this stuff up - and it takes time to stay on top of it. And as I mentioned earlier, the changes haven't stopped; iPad and Android tablets are the latest developments, so does that mean it's more important that you should have an app? Billions of ads are served to smartphones every month, would that work for you? What about social media - should you be active on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn? YouTube is incredibly popular, with some people claiming it's the second most popular search site on the internet - so do you need video? Well, I can tell you this: there is no single right approach to marketing. If there were, everyone would already be doing it. What is right for you depends on factors such as your company profile, your brand image, your target market - and your budget. If you're looking to move a small number of big-ticket items the approach will be radically different to marketing something for under ten dollars where you're anticipating millions of sales.
If you need help making sense of all this, if you want some guidance on what you can - and should - be doing, talk to Intelliga. We may not have all the answers, but we do understand branding and marketing; and we're not too big to claim we do know all the answers.
