Mainstream Marketing

AIMS Canada asks Toby Ward about mainstream marketing

AIMS Discussion List June 8, 2005 -- Issue 604

 AIMS Canada

The growth of RSS feeds, blogs, viral marketing, custom media, and paid search has reached a point where they are no longer novelties, but requisite tools of the media industry.

A room full of marketers gathered recently in Toronto at our Word of Mouth Marketing Breakfast Seminar, as a follow up, we asked

a few questions...

Q: What is the biggest thing that marketers need to do to effectively use online marketing in their overall campaigns?

Know your target audience. Whether through surveys, interviews, focus groups, usability testing, log analysis, etc., it's critical to understand your users and readers and to tailor your marketing in such a way that it resonates with their own personal opinions, preferences, and buying or reading patterns.

In Canada, both iTunes and PureTracks.com have done well with buzz marketing. Outside Canada, Curves, Microsoft (for Halo 2), and Beer.com (Virtual Bartender) have all done good work and generated great 'buzz'.