The current advertising landscape is forcing the art of marketing to evolve, according to global HubSpot CMO Kipp Bodnar.
HubSpot is an inbound marketing and sales platform that wants brands to bring customers to them rather than aggressively pushing their messages out there. Bodnar explained to AdNews the rise of different communication channels and challenges such as adblocking means that brands need to rethink their marketing strategies.
He says the current “interruptive play book” of cold calling, interruptive ads and direct mail, is “really inefficient”, highlighting there's much more effective ways to grow businesses.
“The world hasn't given marketers a choice in this,” he says. “We've got adblockers with 1.5 billion installs, 400 million monthly active users; it's a massive part of the landscape globally. It's taking away ads, [the changing landscape is] taking away the ability to spam people via e-mail as people adopt Slack and WhatsApp. It's much harder to interact with people and force your message upon them, so the best way is to interact with them and bring them to you."
It's for this reason that Bodnar believes in-bound marketing will continue to grow locally. He revealed HubSpot has increased its staff count to 42 staff in Australia.
APAC marketing director for HubSpot Ryan Bonnici explains that the trick is brands need to create content that centres around what a brand's target audience wants. He cites an example of a tutoring company that instead of marketing content about tutoring, it made content around what to do in the school holidays. This way it brought parents to the site who might not be searching for their services directly. It sounds simple, but Bonnici says that because of how marketers have been trained this doesn't always come naturally.
“It makes sense that the market is at, where it's at,” he says. “Marketers have been trained from university to be brand marketers. The new era of marketing is demand generation marketing and to build demand you need to have something that people want. Marketers for a long time haven't been equipped to market things other than their products."
In Bonnici's view, the current ad model is broken, with brands now needing to realise they can't approach selling in the same way they once did.
“People don't want to be sold to in an ad, if you’re sharing relevant content that they're interested in then they'll engage,” he says.
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