New Communication Approaches in Marketing

Since the introduction of digital media the number of different media has increased enormously. There are many factors driving the movements towards new types of media. Firstly and most obviously, the improvement of technologies, both at the workplace and at home has a clear impact. Secondly, marketers are currently constantly talking about creating an experience for the customers. Digital marketing offers a better medium to do so, since they can also let customers participate actively. Additionally, there have been a lot of shifts in the media resulting in smaller target groups at different places. As a result markets have become more fragmented and using digital media it is easier to address everyone. Lastly marketers are now a day more focusing on behavioral targeting, which focuses on developing personal messages based on a person’s behavior on the net.

Together these factors forced a change from a traditional one-to-many communication towards many-to-many communication.

New types of media

When addressing new media, there are two characteristics, being interactivity and digital.

These characteristics can be divided into three groups.

1. Intrusive (the customer is interrupted)

2. Non-intrusive (the customer chooses to see the communication)

3. User-generated (the customer creates communications)

Intrusive:

Internet advertising

Intrusive types of Internet advertising consist of for example: buttons, banners, rectangles and pop-ups.

Product visibility in video (games)

This provides the possibility to show possible consumers the normal use of the products in its environment, and its benefits for daily usage.

Mobile commerce

This tool is mostly used to sent messages to people that have signed up to receive so. Therefore these consumers are already somehow involved. Consumers can receive these messages whenever you want to. This is also called contextual marketing.

Non-intrusive:

Internet advertising

There are also parts of Internet advertising for which the consumer needs to activatie something themselves. Examples of this are: streaming an audio/video, destination sites and sponsored searched/paid links.

Social networking sites

These generate the most publicity, but it brings some difficulties. One of these is that it is hard to control what happens, since it invites people to say their opinions on the company. This is called customer generated media (CGM).

Podcasting

Within this audio advertisements can me embedded in the podcasts. This reaches a very narrow specific targeted market.

Buzz/viral marketing

This can also be called word of mouth marketing and is a very important factor, which is hard to control. There is no use of the internet in delivering messages.

User-generated

Examples of user-generated media are

• Blogs

• Video sites

• Ratings/recommendations.

Issues

When facing these ‘new’ types of media some issues arise. Managers need to pay extra attention to these when using these media.

Metrics and measurements

There is a lot of uncertainty within measuring the effectiveness of different media. It is clear that the measurements used for traditional media can not be used here. It has proven though, that experimentation is a very quick and easy way to do test on a digital matter. Therefore testing different internet approaches at first is not too difficult, though it is harder to measure after releasing them.

Planning and budgeting

As a result of difficulties in measuring the ads, it is also hard in how to budget them, since the measurement of effectiveness it is not always as clear as you would like it to be.

Behavior of costumers

As mentioned above it is hard to control the messaging of the consumers themselves. They can have a big influence through for example blogs and worth of mouth marketing.

Market contact audit (MCA)

The market contact audit is an approach to measure the impact of cross-media exposure. This is done by the collection through different qualitative methods. The procedure follows three phases. Within the first phase research is done within a focus group. Afterwards, in the second phase a survey of more than 500 people is conducted from the brand’s targets audience. At last in the third phase an overall measure is done called the brand experience factor.