Welcome to a brand new year.
Barely a week into the new year, and we’ve all made our New Year’s Resolutions to start new habits and quit old ones; over in Vegas, the Consumer Electronics Show has been busy unveiling the exciting new technology marketers hope will win the hearts and minds of consumers, Twitter has never played such a central role in politics at 4am in the morning, and Oprah might even run for President.
Phew – the pace of change is near neck-breaking already. Good thing that there are a few certainties in life we can hold on to – no, we’re not talking about death and taxes – but something a little more specific to our digital advertising industry; Content was, is, and will continue to be KING. You can rely on that no matter what else changes in the world this year.
As internet users, generation by generation, come to use web connectivity in increasingly sophisticated ways, they have come to want and expect advertising to evolve along with them. Old fashioned marketing and sales approaches stand out as heavy-handed and disruptive, and guess what? They’re beginning to fail as a result. Users ignore them, block them, feel annoyed by them and avoid the brand and sometimes even the publisher that exposed them to such advertising practices.
Internet savvy consumers use the web to build their own digital communities, to find and engage with, and filter out the stuff that doesn’t apply to them and their lives. If an advertiser wants to join them in these specific communities they had better be ready to bring something of value to the party because a blunt sales pitch may not be as effective as it once was.
Offering valuable information and education in the content of your advertising allows users to build their knowledge and inform their buying decisions. These smart internet users want an opportunity to discern, they want information that’s relevant to them, they want to feel educated and informed so that they can make their own decision to move forward with a purchase and they want to feel good about it.
This is where the Native Advertising approach we developed here at Tapstone, excels. We help our advertisers talk to prospective customers in the digital spaces they are already living in through educational, insightful, relevant advertorials. The content we work with advertisers to create, serves to complement user’s online experience and meaningfully contribute to their decision making process. That’s the not so ‘magic’ truth behind the ‘magic bullet’ of our super successful digital advertising.
So, keep in mind as you go about your New Year – yes, there are always new tools, new formats, new styles to ease the advertiser/consumer connection, but content remains critical. If you haven’t nailed your content yet, we can help. Contact the Tapstone team for your free consultation and make your content, king.
