I was on the phone with a librarian last week in Ottawa. She was pointing me to some online resources. I waited on the phone while she did a quick search on the online catalogue for my request. "Hmm" I could hear her frowning on the other side of the line as she tried to get the right keyword combination. "The algorithm isn't quite as good as Google's" she said.
Keywords are a Slippery Slope
For me, that's a perfect example of the appeal of content marketing. Being able to find exactly what you're looking for by typing any combination of keywords.
Keywords are a slippery slope. You have to know your industry, avoid the competitive key terms, understand your synonyms and still manage to integrate these key terms into your website with a degree of frequency. That's why we've always been a proponent of business blogging, so you can work your keywords through the
valuable content you provide (so that it is natural of course and doesn't interfere with online reading of your message).
We've all grown up with commercials and the age of having to wait for your show to return to air before you can continue watching is on it's way out, as I've suggested in a previous post "
Interruptions don't sell". We're tired of being interrupted from getting what we want. We're tired of being forced to buy products that don't really take into account our experience as a consumer. We want to find the products we want to buy--when we're ready to buy them. Not before, and not unsolicited.
Commercials are unsolicited information. They assume anyone watching them is a potential buyer or will be at some point, or will at least pass it on. But the fact is, we can buy whatever we want online when we're ready to go looking for it.
Even if your commercial is funny and clever (there are lots of these, M&Ms' Take Off All Your Clothes, Toyota Sienna's
Rapping Parents, come to mind ) - but the real power is to find those on YouTube and show them to friends for a laugh when I want to - I don't want to have to watch it when my mind is somewhere else, like we were last Saturday night in Ottawa.
Am I off base here? Is my head too far into the content marketing appeal - do commercials still serve a purpose?
Let me know what you think in the Comments below (and No, we won't be gathering your email to throw you onto some spammy list if you do, that would be against Canada's Anti-Spam Laws!)
