Series: New Marketing Strategies

The marketing imperative.  Each year, it gives birth to new buzzwords.  At Polar Design, we’ve witnessed quite a few marketing strategies rise and fall.  The following list is by no means perfect, but provides some perspective on how digital marketing has progressed in our 15 years history:

1999 – 2002 : E-mail marketing

2002 – 2004 : PPC (when even keywords cost $0.05 per click)

2004 – 2007 : Early SEO

2007 – 2010 : Social Media Marketing

2010 – 2014 : Content Marketing

Here at Polar Design, we’re less excited by the emergence of new strategies (which is a signal of saturation, declining cost effectiveness and lower ROI).  The exception is the new emerging field of Utility Marketing, which we’ll be dedicating our next blog series to discuss.

Utility marketing focuses on interrupting prospects at the point of need.  It asks questions like “what can we do to meet a prospects’ needs” and “how can we align prospects needs with our brand, product and values”.  It is literally and figuratively today’s “killer app” for marketing, because it often relies on apps (or more precisely, a highly engaging user experience).

Rather than attempt to lure and engage visitors to a web site with content, Utility Marketing selflessly provides prospects tools they can use or entertaining experiences that also make sense within the context of the sponsor’s brand and offerings.

We’re particularly excited by this trend since it restores the importance of integrated agencies like Polar Design that actually build things for web sites or mobile devices.  We believe that as a full-service interactive agency, our ability to conceptualize, design and also develop Utility Marketing deliverables is  itself of great “utility” to our clients.

This will be an exciting new turn in digital marketing and we can’t wait to share what we’ve learned in the next few blog posts.  Stay tuned!