Blogs seem to be all the rage these days.  Tens of thousands of new ones launch daily and the latest count from Technorati was at somewhere close to 70 Million blogs.  The bigger story, however, is the increasing influence blogs are starting to have on consumer behavior.  According to a recent study  while TV, e-mail, and radio continue to be major drivers of consumer buying behavior, blogging actually had an influence on 6.1% of purchasers (of electronics).

A conclusion from the researcher was as follows:

Marketers need to better understand the changing dynamics of the consumer media market and develop new marketing plans that integrate new media to replace the erosion of traditional media for influence to purchase. Marketers who can’t tap new media options for their influence to purchase will suffer a decline in advertising ROI.

So most marketers of course will read this information…and go start a blog!  DirecTv has recently released a set of ads featuring fictitious cable company executives in the board room discussing strategies to grow sales. If you haven’t caught them you can find the full series of ads here (all of which are funny) but my all time favorite pertains to this particular topic:

The sad part of the whole thing is that I bet there are a LOT of presentations very similar to this ad based on some executive reading the above quote and telling his team that they need to”go viral.”  I have actually sat through one or two of them.  But on the other end of the spectrum from the marketers who are trying to “blog it out” there does sit a good, effective, and time tested way of connecting with your customers via the web.  If you look back at the study I reference earlier you’ll notice that the single highest influence on consumer purchasing behavior was not TV, coupons, web ads, or retail promotion - it was word of mouth (with 42% saying it influenced their purchase). What does this mean for marketers?  Make a good product, communicate with your customers, build a relationship with your customers, and over time you can harness the most powerful marketing tool out there -your customers.

The web provides an incredible set of tools for connecting with and influencing potential buyers but as this ad points out, it must be part of an overall strategy to build long-term relationships with your customers.  Over the next few months we’ll be sharing what some of those strategies look like (including a discussion of paid blogging services and the power of youtube) but it will all be viewed in the context of an overall brand building strategy.  In the meantime, start to plot your next move for reaching the “suburban tweens”

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 10:07 am and is filed under DR Marketing, web marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.