Socialmediaworx

There’s been a lot of debate in recent weeks about whether marketers should be focusing on campaigns or platforms online. If I had to pick, I’d pick platforms. However, the good news is it’s not a zero sum scenario.

The benefits of platforms’ scalable growth vs one-off activity, basis for long-term relationships, and depth of interaction and connection with the brand to name a few, mean that they open up massive opportunity for long-term marketing success.

However for platforms to reach their potential, they can still use the galvanizing force of campaigns to build awareness and activate the community. What changes is the campaign model. The nature of the platforms offer up amazing possibilities for activating the platforms themselves while still communicating brand values through the nature of that activation.

In the offline / broadcast world, advertising can only express a value proposition and it’s often quite illusory and intangible (use this body spray, get a beautiful girl, not). In the online world, we can create these platforms and communities, and use campaigns to activate them and provide real value (get fit, play exclusive games).

The benefit of these campaigns is they are not just driving brand awareness, they are activating their existing platform communities and providing new value to them, as well as driving further membership, creating long-term value for the brand.

We start to then move away from building bespoke campaign experiences every time, which require constant traffic driving for no long-term benefit:

Campaign > Microsite model

To campaigns that feed and build equity in a platform, helping grow a long-term user-base while activating and providing value to the existing audience:

Campaign > Platform model

In this respect we can often end up with the platform living at the core of the marketing effort, with brand and activation layers surrounding it, but refreshing over time.

This is obviously a simplification, there are lots of scenarios where microsites or one-off destination support will still be the right choice for a campaign, or where we aren%u2019t looking to activate around brand platforms.

But as a way of looking past using digital media as simply another broadcast channel to support a brand messaging campaign, and towards using the unique interactive properties of the web to engage and provide value to customers and brand fans over a long-term period, this is a type of campaign and marketing model I think we will start seeing a lot more of in the coming years.