Brands Missing Out On Audience Development

Marketing Daily reporting:
As powerful as digital publishing exec Jeff Rohrs believes content marketing and social media can be, he kept noticing something odd: Lots of great brand content, but no real plan to make sure the right people found it. “There was a giant hole in all the conversations I was having, and this persistent, old-fashioned idea that ‘if we build it, they will come.’”
His contention is that brands need to do a much better job developing digital distribution strategies, leading him to write Audience: Marketing in the Age of Subscribers, Fans & Followers. Rohrs tells Marketing Daily what he thinks is missing.
Q: So tell us more about this organizational sinkhole.
A: Within companies, everyone's responsible for producing their own stuff, often thinking about it on a campaign or even day-to-day basis. So there is someone making sure stuff gets re-tweeted. And there's often a director of content marketing. But there was no equivalent title of, let's say, “senior director of audience development.” And that means lots of missed opportunities. The assumption is that there was this bigger, engaged audience ready to eat that content up, but then there is no person or team to make that happen. My point is, that should be a core marketing responsibility.
Q: Is there an example of a brand you think is acing audience development?...
Q: Who is doing it badly?
A: I don't like to call brands out by name, but if you look at last year's Super Bowl advertisers, you'll see plenty -- almost none had any kind of call to action in their ads. One car company, for example, paid something like $3.8 million for one spot, advertising a car that wasn't coming out for months. The final frame was just the logo and a Facebook URL. That's a huge leap of faith. They should have done something to encourage people to opt in to some kind of direct relationship: Email us, follow us on Instagram. Something.
Q: So it's a lost opportunity?
A: Yes. If we get people to enter into a permission-based marketing channel, it lowers my cost to reach them and speak to them. That car company missed a tremendous rollout opportunity.
Q: What's another success story?
A: Oreo. So much has been written about “the tweet heard ’round the world” from last year's Super Bowl, as if it's a social story. But it's not. It's an audience story...