From Skip to Follow
How to Go Viral with Permission Marketing
Most people skip ads, don’t you?
Even we marketers skip ads, but then we go to work and create ads that we know people will skip!
And yet, at a time when people are even willing to pay in order not to be served any ads, we also see the opposite happening elsewhere: people voluntary searching for brands and following them.
This phenomenon reflects two types of marketing:
1. Interruption or traditional marketing, which is the type of advertising that most people skip, block and even sometimes pay to avoid, if possible.
2. Permission marketing, which gets people to voluntarily follow brands.
This video sets the mood and tone of the type of content that people use in permission marketing :
The idea of permission marketing was developed by Seth Godin in 1999 and is characterized by three features :
· Anticipated — people look forward to hearing from you
· Personal — the messages are directly related to the individual
· Relevant — the marketing is about something the audience are interested in
Ever since the introduction of permission marketing, companies and start- ups have been inspired to adapt similar marketing tactics, but under different names such as content and social media marketing.
Now that there is a wide range of research showing millennials don’t respond to traditional ads, the need to adapt permission marketing will be even greater in the coming years.
As such the ad industry will have to move out of traditional interruption marketing.
So far, I have not come across a large traditional agency or even a small creative boutique that is solely focused on this type of marketing.
However there are many entrepreneurs who understand the benefits of permission marketing and are currently demonstrating its power to reach and engage with millions of people.
These entrepreneurs are self-made social media artists who permissibly advertise products in an authentic way.
You can read more about them here : 7 Reasons why Social Media Artists are Disrupting the Advertising Industry
Most ad agencies are great at developing content marketing initiatives and even creative ideas that can help gain a following.
However, it’s hard to find an ad agency that has millions of subscribers on YouTube or Snapchat.
As a result, agencies normally lack the data and experience that is gathered from managing big communities and engaging with them on a daily basis.
Social media artists on the other hand use their daily social posts as small experiments that return concrete feedback and data on their content.
In the coming years ad agencies and brands will have to adapt permission marketing in order to become influencers in their own field and develop content that people would like to follow instead of skip.
