Traditional marketing takes time. For consumer packaged goods, months of work and millions of dollars go into the development and launch of a new soft drink or a rebranded dish soap.
Consider a traditional company, circa 1990. Once a year, executives gathered for strategic planning and set the long-term objectives of the firm. Then, every quarter, middle managers reviewed the performance of the organization against those goals.
Quarterly results showed whether sales targets were being met. By analyzing these results, the company could tell whether a particular region, product, or campaign was working. They adjusted spending, hired and fired, and maybe even asked research and development to change something about the product.
The call center also yielded good insights: in the last quarter, what were the most common customer complaints? Which issues took the longest to resolve? Where were the most refunds issued, and what products were returned? All of this data was folded into the quarterly review, which led to short-term fixes such as a product recall, training for call center operators, or even documentation sent to the channel.
At the same time, the company gathered marketing data from researchers and surveys. Market results showed how well campaigns were reaching audiences. Focus group data provided clues to how the target market responded to new messages, branding, and positioning.
After a couple of quarters, if something wasn’t going smoothly, the issues were raised to the executive level for next year’s strategic planning. If one standout product or service was succeeding beyond expectations, it might have been a candidate for additional development or a broader launch.
In other words, we’d see the results next year.
The Web has accelerated this process dramatically, because feedback is immediate. Customers can self-organize to criticize or celebrate a product. A letter-writing campaign might have taken months, but a thousand angry moms reached Motrin in a day. As a result, product definition and release cycles are compressed, making proper analysis of web traffic and online communities essential.
For web applications, the acceleration is even more pronounced. While a soft drink or a car takes time to build, ship, sell, and consume, web content is scrutinized the second it’s created. On the web, next year is too late. Next week is too late.
Web users are fickle, and word of mouth travels quickly, with opinions forming overnight. Competitors can emerge unannounced, and most of them will be mining your website for ideas to copy and weaknesses to exploit. If you’re not watching your online presence—and iterating faster than your competitors—you’re already obsolete.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. Watch your online presence and you’ll have a better understanding of your business, your reputation, and your target market.
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