Interruption Marketing Vs RSS Feeds

Excuse me, can I just ask you to stop what you’re doing whilst I attempt to sell you something that you may not be interested in, open minded about or receptive to?

If you’re in business for yourself you probably get a fair amount of unsolicited telephone sales calls, emails and mail shots on a daily basis. How you react to these attempts to grab your attention and more importantly for the issuer, your cash; depends largely upon the skill of the marketer who is trying to grab your attention and your desire or need for the product/service they are attempting to sell.

There’s a whole industry out there which is geared towards creating the ultimate sales call, the perfect email or the most innovative mail shot which will grab your attention and motivate you towards a purchase.

These techniques are tried and tested and if appropriately targeted, are very powerful in themselves for generating business. You may use them yourself and if you get business from them, I’ll have no need to explain further.

However the problem with this type of marketing, often called “Interruption Marketing”, is that it’s increasing becoming ineffective for the very nature of its definition. That is to say it “interrupts” which in turn just adds to the unwanted clutter in the already cluttered lives of your average business person. As a result many of us simply switch-off to the message that is being delivered.

Angelo Fernando gives an excellent overview as to why illustrated with a scenario we can all relate to, in his article “So, Interruption Marketing Isn’t Working!” Worth reading!

Now I’m not saying that unsolicited mail-shots, emails or telemarketing don’t work and should be canned as a technique. This is not the case so long as such “interruptions” are targeted at named and pre-qualified individuals (by “pre-qualified” I mean that it is known that the recipient has a need or desire for the product being marketed).

However there is another technique.

Into the marketing mix comes a new upstart when it comes to using the web as a marketing tool which is a form of “Push Marketing”, namely; RSS Feeds.

RSS Feeds and Feed Readers

The best way to explain what RSS feeds are is to show you an example on a website that most Brits can relate to.

Take a look at the BBC News site at http://news.bbc.co.uk

In the top right hand corner you’ll see a little orange icon next to the link “News Feeds”

This icon and link indicates that RSS feeds are available on the site. Park this thought as I’ll explain more shortly!

Time to get your imagination working!

If you’ve decided to keep abreast of the news using the BBC News site; to ensure that you get the latest news as it’s reported, you’ll need to make sure that you visit the site every half-hour or so just to make sure you don’t miss anything.

This is fine if you’re only following the updates on one website, in this case the BBC News site; as it’s easy to make a mental note or even put a reminder in your Outlook™ or on your phone to keep re-visiting the site.

However, things start to get complicated when you follow multiple websites that update their content regularly.

For instance, let’s imagine, in addition to the BBC site, you also want to be informed of news articles as they happen on the Times website or on those favourite blogs that you like to read.

If you keep abreast of changes on many different blogs or websites, then it starts to become a chore to visit each different website in turn, read what’s new, and then move on to the next site. If you relied upon email updates then you’re going to get inundated with the things and before long you’re into “Interruption Marketing” territory and you’ll quickly start to ‘blank’ what’s being sent to you.

This is where RSS Feeds are the Killer App!

RSS feeds allow you read updates from numerous websites when it’s convenient to you in a single place i.e. on a webpage or in a piece of software on your desktop, without having to visit multiple websites.

If a website “Pushes” its content to you via an RSS feed and you may “Subscribe” to that feed, after which you can then read that content from each website in a single place using an RSS Reader when it’s convenient to you and without being interrupted by emails.

That’s what those orange feed icons are on the BBC, Times Online and Google Blog sites that I mentioned earlier, namely their RSS Feeds. By subscribing to each RSS feed in an RSS Reader (sometimes called an RSS Aggregator or RSS Newsreader) such as Google Reader, you can choose to read each favourite website’s update quickly and easily from one single web page which can be set as one of your browser’s Home Pages.

This is all fine and dandy as far as informational sites go; but where do RSS Feeds make an impact when it comes to marketing a product or service?

Again using your now practiced imagination, think of your own website.

Could you write content that is of value to your potential customers? Perhaps it could be reviews of your products with case studies of how they can be practically used, or perhaps you could offer tips and techniques that people in your industry would value. If you can, then start posting articles to your website. If people value your content enough they’ll start subscribing to your RSS Feed (assuming it’s set-up to produce one) which means you’ll start to get a subscriber list of people you know are interested in what you have to say. Worth its weight in marketing gold!

All this and without having to interrupt people to tell them about your company, services, products or expertise!