The 360 Touchpoints of Marketing

MadMen don’t “create” marketing/advertising anymore. Marketing today is a 360 Touchpoint business, with more and more people branding themselves and creating their own marketing.

360 Touchpoint Marketing involves a host of exploding trends. Here are a few.

1. Blogging. How do a lot of young mothers make buying decisions? They read the recommendations/conversations of the “mommy bloggers” because they trust the mommy bloggers more than they trust you and me.

2. Information Marketing. If you’re in business, you’re an expert. If you’re REI, you tout excellence and daring in outdoor activities -- and you give advice.

3. Being Who Your Customers Are. How does Trader Joe’s market? They speak to those customers in a thousand intimate ways. Checkout how Trader Joe’s marketing has become the Trader Joe’s soapbox.

4. Building community. If you know about it, you write about. What the heck do we think Facebook biz pages are about anyway? To find out ask Victoria’s Secret, J.C. Penney, American Egale, Kohl’s, Forever 21, and Abercrombie and Fitch. This is where brands “share” who they are and what they know. And, if any of the folks who “like” them sniff promotion, it’s a serious stink.

5. Creating buzz … as in “let them talk” … as in McRib and McDonald’s reaction to every bit of it -- the yummy and the yucky.

6. Everything else. This changes every day, of course, but consider these already-established 360 Touchpoint Marketing efforts? Podcasting, YouTube (The Wall Street Journal says you can even sell it without doing a video), slideshare, flickr, LinkedIn, and dozens and dozens and dozens more.

7. Content Curation. To understand this new and important marketing focused on “brand as expert,” Check out Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman’s new book Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business or check out this article by Steve Rosenbaum.

Marketers are service providers, yes. But we, too, have customers and we, too, can adopt 360 Touchpoint Marketing strategies for our own businesses. What better way to demonstrate thought leadership in our field?

-- scrubbed by Marketing Brillo