You Can Hate the Game. But You Better Know How to Play It.

The Real World of Advertising

If your understanding of the advertising industry comes from watching Mad Men, you don’t understand how marketing works today.

Back when traditional advertising was the only game in town, things were a lot simpler for your typical Austin advertising agency. Top advertising companies picked from a relatively small number of media outlets (print, radio, or TV) and they delivered your message to their relatively large audience. You could still run your marketing strategy the same way, but it’s expensive as hell.

When digital marketing first came to be, the new media landscape became much more scattered. We even saw it ourselves as an Austin internet marketing company . The audiences were split into numerous niches across various websites and content platforms. That’s still true to some extent, but now all these numerous sources of news and entertainment have been centralized on a few monopolistic aggregators: the social networks and search engines that dominate the market.

Utilizing Content Strategy

Now the advertising world looks a bit more like traditional marketing. If you are buying ads, you’re going to do it on only a few networks: most likely Google or Facebook, maybe Bing or Pinterest too. Those channels can be quite effective, but they can certainly be expensive. This is where content strategy comes in. The idea is to utilize organic reach of these platforms to reach the right audience without forking over your marketing spend directly to Zuckerberg, Brin, and Page. When I founded my internet marketing company in Austin, Rock Candy Media, I knew I didn’t want our clients to have to rely solely on one of these massive channels.

This is why content strategy is at the core of our internet marketing methodology. Initially, we didn’t even have a paid search department. We knew other internet marketing agencies in Austin relied on it too heavily, which often meant that they neglected to come up with a plan to increase organic search ranking. In the long run, organic ranking is what will deliver the greatest returns.

Outside of search, social networks, blogging, video content, and podcasts offer the opportunity for your brand to become its own media platform. Even traditional media agencies and networks are taking advantage of this, creating web exclusive content to promote TV shows. The NBC sitcom The Good Place has its own podcast produced by the network. Brands can create their own content and distribute it on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. If it’s good, it’ll get shared and you will build an audience. It might take a bit of paid spend to grease the wheels, but a strategy that is aimed at building a devoted following will pay dividends once you have your devotees lined up.