Toss a stone into a still pond, and you can watch the resulting waves propagate out from the point of impact until they silently reach the shore.
This is how a lot of businesses look at the internet. Specifically, at digital marketing. Every single one of us has a glassy still pond into which we can hurl stones. The waves we make have the potential to reach every corner of the globe. They do, in fact. But if they just cause the water to quietly lap at the shore, what are we actually accomplishing.
Just throwing something out on the internet is essentially the same thing as lobbing a single stone into a still pond. You’re going to make some sort of wave, but will someone on the opposite shore even notice?
So throw two stones. If they land in the same spot, the waves will amplify each other a bit, and the sounds of the water at the shoreline may increase slightly for a moment. If they land in two different spots the waves will intersect and amplify or mute each other depending on how they collide. If the two stones land too close together or too far apart the impact the two sets of waves have on each other may not even be noticeable.
Repeating the same thing on a regular interval on the internet can have the same result. Too far apart and no one will notice. Too close together, you risk drowning yourself out with your own noise.
What we fail to take into consideration when we think of the internet as this giant, still pond is the fact that the internet is far from still. There are millions of stones being dropped into the water at the same time, and if we try to map all the waves they make, we will fail gloriously.
So how do you make any sort of impact when the waters are churning? Strategy.
One request that all digital marketing firms get is “How do we get this fist sized stone to cause elephant sized waves in this pond?” Okay, maybe they really ask “How do we get this video/commercial/ad campaign to go viral?” The answer is still the same, though.
You can’t.
A video, or marketing campaign, or message can’t be designed so that it will make elephant sized waves in the waters of the internet. It’s not something that can be planned or coordinated. In most cases, when something goes viral it’s because the circumstances around its release caused a perfect storm. And even then, it’s not the original video, or marketing campaign, or message that is making the waves. It’s the amplification from hundreds of OTHER voices that intensify the waves and rock the boat of public awareness.
So, that’s where you focus if you want to have a digital marketing campaign have maximum impact. It’s not enough to release the message and watch it splash. You have to pay attention to how the ripples interact with what’s around them. What is amplifying the waves? What is muting them? What is stopping them all together? At what point do you release a second stone to take advantage of the first stone’s amplified ripples?
There are far too many considerations to take into account unless you have a dedicated digital marketing guru on staff. That’s where AlphaPixel Reach comes in.
We know the waters. We’ve been navigating the waves. We know when to throw a stone, and when you might need to skip one across the surface instead of lobbing it into the center. We focus on taking your message and not only tossing it into the pond, but watching how its waves interact with your clients and potential clients so that when it’s time to throw the next, and the one after that, they are all amplifying each other, pushing your message across the turbulent waters towards shore.
Because in the end, that’s what we all want: Your message rippling through the internet and reaching the people who need it.