Five by Five

Ask any digital marketer about direct response and they’ll more than likely talk to you about click thru rates for email and banner ad campaigns. The desired response of these campaigns is usually to entice the individual to the advertiser’s web site, to their domain, to their sphere of influence. This all seems reasonable but unfortunately today’s online audience are not clicking. Maybe it’s time to stop asking them to click and start asking them to digg (sic).

Let me explain, Tim Berners-Lee’s Semantic Web promises to unlock all content from its website containers. We are already starting to see this happening via technologies synonymous with Web 2.0 such as RSS and microformats.

With content being released and spread across the blogosphere and the broader social media landscape, the online audience is becoming more and more
used to consuming media and content on their ‘start pages’, in their RSS readers and on their desktops.

As these new viewing habits increase, the pressure is on the digital marketers to switch their direct response objective from ‘pulling people to their web site’ to ‘pushing content out’.

There are a number of tactics we can use in order to meet this objective. For example, enabling the viewer to quickly and easily digg, tag and share our content on the popular social media sites.

In summary, if we define direct response as ‘the objective to elicit a response from an individual’ then we can conclude that the desired
responses now being sought by digital marketers should include digging, sharing and tagging.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 4th, 2007 at 9:34 am and is filed under Front Page Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.