Remember when you were younger and new toys would hold your attention for some time, but then you’d quickly run off and do something else. Your focus would be extreme, but fleeting.

That same tendency doesn’t disappear as we get older, we still can revert to that mindset. Lately, everyone’s been focused on social media. It may be a great marketing tool, but it’s important to not lose sight of your ultimate goal and bottom line. Social media is only one of many marketing options available online.

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5 Ways to Stay Away from Over Focus

Just knowing that “tunnel vision” exists can save you from the trap, but it might not be enough. Sometimes you need a set of rules to follow, to keep you from making this mistake.

1. Create an integrated strategy
The first thing to do is to make sure you’re starting with an integrated strategy. Online marketing is similar to a machine that requires each individual gear to work in perfect harmony. Each marketing medium can play a different part in your online strategy.

For example, display advertising and social media have great potential to drive demand. A good search engine marketing campaign can take that demand and push conversions. Without both aspects of this strategy, the marketing campaign won’t have demand to convert or will attempt to convert search volume that doesn’t exist.

2. Identify your goals and resources
A good strategy for ensuring optimal use of resources is to be organized. Create a list of your goals and KPI’s (key performance indicators). Then outline what resources you have available.

This will force your resources and goals to dictate strategy. For example, have a web development team but no content team? It might be better to dedicate time and energy in making sure your site is technically optimized before investing in social media.

3. Ask your consumers
Sometime integrated marketing strategies is difficult to do. It’s not always clear how or why to create the strategy. In these instances, it can be best to ask your consumers what they think.

Using surveys to ask your consumers how they found you, what the found had the most impact, and what they wish was different can be a powerful tool. Take the data to determine gaps in your acquisition process and determine where resources can be used to create new marketing channel or reach targets.

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4. Ignore the hype
Regardless of what you do, if you get suckered into the hype, you’ll find a way to justify investing in a marketing medium. Recognizing that new and exciting marketing tools are just that, new and exciting, can keep you from focusing on an extraneous marketing expense.

Remember, there’s no single marketing medium that is the end all be all. Whether it be paid vs organic or even online vs offline, they all need to work together to make a successful marketing strategy.

5. Create an experimental budget
Finally, be sure to create an “experimental” budget. The budget is dedicated for trying new marketing strategies, experimental tools, and innovative ideas.
Defining monetary boundaries forces you to maintain your current marketing strategies, while slowly trying new ones. It makes sure you don’t lose too much or stray too far when trying something new.

Conclusion

Over focus is a trap many marketers fall into. It’s easy to get tunnel vision when something new and exciting comes along. Making sure you don’t forget about other marketing mediums and strategies are important skills good marketers must learn.

Although social media may be exciting, it can’t stand-alone. Each marketing medium needs to work harmoniously to create a successful strategy. Integrating social media, search engine optimization, email marketing, display advertising, content marketing, with the next big thing is a skill that great marketers learn to master.

How are you integrating your strategies? What have you done to make sure you don’t fall into the marketing tunnel vision trap?

Do You Suffer From Marketing Tunnel Vision? is a post by: Samir Balwani

It’s time to make a decision. You need to decide: Do you maintain the status quo and attempt to simply weather this fiscal crisis? Or do you put aside risk, recognize the need, and innovate your company to come ahead of your competitors?

Innovation is driven by two major factors: necessity and an intelligent disregard to risk. The most important aspect is the “intelligent disregard to risk”.

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The Risk of Innovation

Businesses must experiment to grow – “if you’re not moving forward, you’re falling behind.” Yet they still disregard future profits and maintain a risk adverse posture.

The concern compounds because as the economy worsens, businesses become more conservative. They become even more less likely to invest in new ideas. This attitude could be their undoing.

Instead of suffocating innovation and standing still, it’s your duty to open the collective minds and allow creative freedom. Budget in innovation, even when other budgets are being tightened.

The Need for Innovation

But budgeting is only part of the equation. Innovation is borne of necessity. When a brand needs something, when things change, that’s where innovation rescues.

Social media marketing is exactly this type of innovation. Marketing departments realized that consumers were moving online. Then the economy slipped into a recession and brand managers were forced to find another way to advertise their brands without buying online advertising.

Marketers realized that by leveraging free accounts and online word of mouth marketing, they may be able to reach consumers at a fraction of the price.

Therein lies the risk we spoke about before. The “may”. Until it’s tested and tried, no marketer will no for sure whether social media marketing actually works.

Identifying Good Innovation

But how does a manager determine which risks are worthy and which should be left alone?

For many the first step is identifying your need. What needs to be completed? What are the requirements and what resources are available? This problem solving approach allows you to determine which theories actually solve a problem the brand needs to overcome.

Once you’re able to determine that a problem can be solved, the next step is to determine if it’s worth the risk. However, without being able to forecast return and most likely having little external data, this can be difficult.

It’s here that we attempt to create a problem solving flow. We have to identify as much information as possible. What is the outcome? What are the inputs? What could possibly go wrong? Which parts of the plan are most likely to fail?

The more questions you answer, the more likely you’re able to recognize the risk in trying out this new idea.

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Determining Risk: A Hypothetical

Let’s reuse the social media-marketing example from before. Consider a brand manager looking to use Facebook. There’s no concrete data suggesting that Facebook can effect branding, create an ROI, or even reach the correct demographic.

So how does a manager determine if investing in Facebook is a worthy project?

Identify the Need

The first step is to “identify the need it fulfills”. If it’s not instantly clear what this innovation solves, then it might not be worth investing in. Also, is the need so dire currently, or soon to be dire to warrant the investment?

Estimate Resources

Second, estimate the total amount of resources you’ll need to dedicate. Create a cap. A huge problem is when managers chase bad ideas with cash. This is a recipe for disaster.

Setup Metrics and Tracking

Next, it’s important to set metrics to track your goals. In the case of social media marketing, you would set goals such as a specific number of page views or time on site. Be firm about tracking metrics to track success. Without setting goals, you’ll never know if the idea is actually working.

Set a Timetable

Another potential problem is that most managers never set a timetable. Although it’s difficult to project when something will begin to start showing returns, you need to set an end date. Without one, you may continue to go through the rabbit hole.

Overcome Your Fear

Sometimes its fear that keeps a business from innovating, and sometimes fear is what makes innovative ideas fail. Don’t be afraid to drop the project if it fails to live up to the timetable and resources you set. Also, don’t be afraid to return to the project and try again.

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Innovation can save businesses, create amazing breakthroughs, and lead to industry shattering creations. What are you doing to overcome your fear, identify risk, and invest in new ideas?

The Risks of Innovation and How to Make Smart Decisions is a post by: Samir Balwani

The online marketing landscape is ever evolving. Today, we use an integrated approach that includes, search marketing, SEO, display advertising, and many more. But, as consumers change so do our marketing strategies…

We often see marketing tactics gain and lose power as users become more aware of them or consumer intent changes. It seems as if we’re at a marketing crossroads again.

There’s been a recent trend, showing that social media marketing has been growing, while display advertising has become less effective.

What is Display Advertising?

Before exploring how display advertising has become less effective, we have to first explain how it works.

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There are currently three advertising models in the display-marketing world: Cost per Click (CPC), Cost per Action (CPA), and Cost per Mille (CPM).

In the CPC model, an advertiser pays every time a banner ad is clicked on.

The CPA model charges the advertiser only when a user that clicked on a banner ad actually performs an action. For most this means a product was bought or a lead generated.

Currently, the most common model is the CPM payment style. In this instance, ads are sold by inventory based on impressions. Advertisers pay for the number of times the ad is shown to a consumer.

The reason why CPM is most common is because banner ads generally have a low click through rate. This makes it difficult to make an ad that maximizes CPC and CPA rates.

Content producers try to minimize the focus on conversions and instead focus on impressions.

How Does it Work?

The actual process for building and executing a display campaign is extremely in-depth. It’s difficult and definitely takes a specific skill set. In it’s most basic form the process follows these steps:

• Advertisers identifies campaign’s target demographic
• Based on tools such as Quantcast or Google Ads Planner, the advertiser decides which sites their banner ads should run on
• The advertiser sends an proposal outlining what they’d like to do and what their goals are
• The content provider responds to the proposal with either a general run-of-the-mill ad campaign or some form of sponsorship
• The advertiser decides which proposals fulfill their goals at the price they’ve outlined and the campaign begins
• Once a campaign is completed a report is generated that outlines the total number of impressions and total cost
• Then the whole process is repeated again

The problem with this process happens when site owners allow advertisers to create custom ad units, full-page takeovers, and other sponsorship ideas. If you can think of it, and are willing to pay for it, site owners will do it. Creating an interesting predicament.

The Economic Concerns

For an economy to be sustainable, the laws of supply and demand need to be in equilibrium.

If there isn’t enough supply, then the price must go up to lessen the demand. If there is too much supply, then the price must go down to increase the demand.

But what happens when the supply is infinite? The economy begins to break down because the commodity starts to become worthless.

This is what’s happening in the display-advertising world. Site owners are continually reducing their value instead of increasing it.

The supply of advertising space continues to grow as new content producers enter the space, and as current content producers continue to add more advertising space to their online platforms.

Demand is having a hard time keeping up with the increased and potential supply.

The User Problem: Ad Blockers & Ad Blindness

Even if we ignore the economic concerns, there are a number of user concerns. As site owners and advertisers become overzealous with ad units, consumers have started experiencing “ad blindness”.

Ad blindness is a term used to denote the state of conscious or subconscious ignorance of advertisements placed in a web page by visitors due to various reasons like irrelevance, vanilla design and familiarization of the webpage layout. For example, ad blindness is a behavioral challenge presented by frequently re-visited portals like news portals, discussion forums and blogs. Worst affected tended to be the right hand column of standard tri-column layouts, which usually holds text ads. In this case users tended to ignore this column even if non-ad content was placed there. [source]

Some users have taken their disdain of ads to a new level and have started using ad blockers. These plugins allow a visitor to block ads from their site entirely; a problem sites like digg are extremely familiar with.

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So what is the future? If content providers and advertisers don’t find an innovative way to evolve the display advertising medium, what will happen?

The Future for Content Creators

If nothing changes, content providers will have a hard time being profitable while trying to sell an ever-devaluing commodity.

Instead, content providers will be forced to look for new ways to monetize their content through new business models.

This has already started as a trend. A number of social media sites have shown that they’re supporting their advertising income with paid programs and commercial accounts.

For many sites, the commodity is changing from impressions and content to data and engagement.

Twitter is the prime example of this evolution in online profits. Even though they’ll be launching an advertising platform, they’ve also announced commercial accounts and data partnerships with major search engines.

But these business models aren’t feasible for everyone. What about pure content producers, like newspapers?

The Newspaper Model

Newspapers struggle with a predicament in that currently the only business model that has worked has been a pure advertising one.

Only a select few sites have seen success in changing to a business model that includes subscriptions. Even those that have succeeded have been extremely niche, with content that has been deemed more valuable than straightforward news. Example: FT.com.

So how do the other pure content producers survive? They must find a balance between free, ad driven content, and paid content.

Many newspapers are experiencing this flux as they tackle the question of how much is too much free content and what are consumers willing to pay for?

As more content producers begin to rely less on advertisers for profit, they’ll lessen supply of ad units. Decreasing the number of ad units would make them more scarce, decreasing the effect of ad blindness and allowing demand to finally catch up to the supply.

The Future for Advertisers

Content producers are not the only ones that will be forced to evolve; advertisers will be forced to think of new innovative ways to reach consumers.
As display advertising becomes more and more marginalized, new mediums such as social media will begin to gain importance.

Advertising will need to be subtler. We’re moving away from interruption marketing and enter a world where advertising blends harmoniously with consumers in their everyday life.

How are you preparing for this shift? Have you noticed a changed in display advertising? What do you think will happen next?

The Slow Death of Display Advertising… is a post by: Samir Balwani

Welcome to the digital age, a place where magazines and newspapers no longer can stand on their own. We’ve entered an era where printing is too expensive, and print ads are ineffective. It’s a time where the paper we used to buy at the shop, is online for free.

Newspapers have become a digital media, and with that transition have embraced new media and new marketing tools. Understanding that newspapers are using social media is just the first step, recognizing how they do it is the next.

Social Media Sharing

Traditional media is doing a great job recognizing the viral nature of their work. With so much content, and most of it being breaking news, the chances of it making the front page of sites like digg is very high. Every time the New York Times goes hot, they reinforce their brand as the first with breaking news and highlight that the community prefers their articles.

Telegraph.co.uk highlights all their other posts on digg, using the digg widget. Sometimes the news is breaking news, or odd and funny. You can bet that they’re getting a lot of traffic, and introducing new people to their content because of the widget.

Although I haven’t found another traditional publisher using the digg widget, I noticed a lot were using sharing tools, similar to the image below. They’ve recognized that the first step to viral content is making it easy to share.

Highlighting Blogs

In the blogosphere is where a true convergence is seen. Traditional media no longer acts like an island, separated from new media. They’ve embraced the idea of the “amateur journalist” and are recognizing the conversation that occurs.

Many news sites are tracking blogs that are referencing their articles, and then ranking the content similar to how technorati ranks blogs based on inbound links.

Recently, there’s been a jump in the number of blogs, twitter accounts, and podcasts done by journalist. It’s a great way for them to publish on their own, and old media took notice. Now, it’s rare to find a traditional media site without a blog or blog section. It’s being used to highlight editorials, and journalists’ opinions.

Promoting Widgets

Similar to social media sharing, traditional media is exploring viral marketing. Widgets are being used to get articles on blogs and desktops, as well as making it easy to share content. Telgraph.co.uk has done a great job with their widgets (as well as other social media strategies) and I’d be surprised if other sites don’t follow in their footsteps.

What It Means for Marketers and Bloggers

So why does all this matter? Well first and foremost, as traditional media pulls new media into the fold, the line that separates “reputable” news and “amateur” news is blurring. In the haste to be first, many stories are leaking through the cracks without an editorial process.

It also means that what might just be important to you (something you quickly wrote on your blog) might get picked up by a news site. Journalists are reading blogs, they’re looking at blogs for new stories, and trying to get the pulse of the community. Don’t be surprised to find your blog or an article your wrote in the Wall Street Journal. You never know when someone might call you for an interview.

I’d love to hear what you think about this topic. The idea of traditional media and new media is one with many facets, and recognizing how they’re melding is important to know what’s going to happen next. If you have an example of new uses, or an idea on how traditional media could use bloggers more, leave a comment. We want to know.

Where Traditional Media and New Media Converge is a post by: Samir Balwani