Aug

Do you 1888 Goodwin Champions a considerable amount of your marketing budget on traditional offline marketing approaches such as radio, television and newspaper advertising? You could be significantly losing out.

Like it or not, the coming of Internet Marketing has sounded the death-knell for traditional methods of marketing and associated advertising. Newspapers are rapidly shedding staff; even the UK's Channel 4 Television can no longer survive without merging with another channel due to the drop in advertising revenue it had previously relied upon.

So why is offline marketing dying off?

Compare the traditional direct mail marketing technique with online email marketing approaches. Take a the Transformers letter and mail it out to 10,000 people. Add up the cost of stationery and postage, even with discounts for mass postage, you need a good budget. Now compose an email, add your database of 10,000 customers and email it directly to their Batman action figure in less than 10 seconds. The cost is nothing and you essentially require no budget.

Furthermore, recent research indicates that direct mail only generates a 2% response rate; email marketing generates 5 times as much. Offline Marketing cannot compete with these results.

Is it a surprise that traditional offline marketing methods are dying off? Their share of the market shrinking, revenue receding as the online marketing sector grows and takes over the lion's share of the market?

If we contrast the range of offline marketing, we easily reveal an important weakness in the traditional approach. Offline marketing is limited by geographic location. Newspaper circulation or television/radio broadcasting range limits the effectiveness of the offline marketing campaign. Online marketing campaigns are geographically limitless. If you wish, you can advertise your product or service to millions of people across the entire world.

Broadcast and print advertising has always been expensive, and in their dying days, they still won't compete with the Internet on cost. Online marketing offers targeted marketing, rather than blanket marketing at a fraction of the cost.

That neatly brings us onto the ability to target your exact customer. Offline advertising can only attempt to do this by hoping enough men are watching football, or women are watching Desperate Housewives. With the online alternative, you can target the very customers that are already looking for your products or services. Again, offline marketing cannot compete with this level of accuracy in finding customers and bringing them to your website.

Using Internet Marketing rapidly reduces the time between a potential customer seeing your marketing and responding to it. Online marketing promotes immediate reaction, generating immediate revenue. Your customer sees your ad. The customer reads your ad, they like what they read, they check the price, and it's good. They click to add the product to the shopping cart; they fill in their details and click to pay. Within three clicks or so, you've made a sale. Traditional marketing methods simply cannot produce these rapid results, or the volume of increased business that they are capable of producing.

Whilst some people will cling on to offline marketing, suspicious of the Internet's success, their competitors using online marketing are increasing their sales by the hour.

Adrian Bold is Head of Search for Impact Media Ltd, a leading href="impactmedialtd.co.uk/">UK SEO Company who help clients in a wide range of industry sectors with their online marketing campaigns.

In the course of our work lives, we learn specific tasks associated with our job positions, sometimes putting our strategic thinking on auto pilot. We perform our job responsibilities satisfactorily enough, but often we don't develop the reflective judgment skills of 'critical thinking'. When complex problems or difficult situations arise we continue to function without sufficient analysis of the situation, including using curiosity to resolve the problem. Across industries, leaders that use 'critical thinking' know that they can always improve their reasoning competence. They accept that they may occasionally fall victim to mistakes in reasoning, spells of human irrationality, personal prejudices, alterations in business clarity; and, the non-conformance to accepted social rules. What is 'critical thinking'?

Critical thinking is a mental process of solving problems giving proper consideration to the current evidence, the entire context in which the Garbage Pail Kids exists; and, the relevant methods or techniques for forming a new judgment. These elements also happen to be the key defining characteristics of professional fields and scholastic disciplines. This is why critical thinking can occur within a given subject field, industry, social community; and in all those realms where humans need to interact and make final conclusions. You may have heard your grandparents call this, the good use of theory and common sense.

As Dr. Steven D. Schafersman of the Department of Geology Miami University states, "While we as professors have the ability ourselves to think critically (we had to learn these skills to earn advanced degrees in our disciplines), many students--including our own--never develop critical thinking skills. Why? There are a number of reasons. The first goal of education, 'what to think,' is so traditionally obvious that instructors and students may focus all their energies and efforts on the task of transmitting and acquiring basic knowledge. Many students find that this goal alone is so overwhelming that they have time for little else. The second goal of education, 'how to think' or critical thinking, is often so subtle that instructors fail to recognize it and students fail to realize its absence."

By using the processes of critical thinking, individual managers, even entire departments, begin seeing something as possible that they did not see as possible before. Consequently, there is growth of the individual and there is the increased likelihood that what the organization now sees as possible will become innovations for the future.

What are the attributes of a refined critical thinker? These thinkers use many of the following elements:

Raise vital questions, uncertainties, topics for debate, formulating all of these clearly and
precisely for discussion
Gather and assess relevant information, testing the information against relevant criteria and any standards in place
Assesses opposing statements and current standing arguments
Are able to admit a lack of understanding or comprehension of subject matter
Are genuinely interested in finding new and unprecedented solutions
Are willing to suspend personal beliefs, organizational assumptions, subsequently weigh them against facts
Listen carefully to others and give constructive feedback
Look for all evidence, internal and external, to support pending assumptions
Are able to adjust assumptions when new facts are found
Look for proof without judgment of others involved in problem resolution
Maintain a commitment to overcome native ego-centrism and socio-centrism
Communicate effectively & in a timely manner with all others in determining new solutions to complex conundrums
When you need to develop 'critical thinking', ask yourself:
What other resources do I/ we need to really address this problem; and, can I/we enlist these resources without the risk of violating company policies?
Are we educated enough to know what it is we don't know about this problem, project, or company matter? What other resources do we truly need to make this decision effective in the competitive industry space?
How can I/we address this specific situation in a way that was unthinkable 1 year ago, 1 month ago, 1 week ago?
Are we using the intellectual tools, theoretical concepts or technology principles that enable us to analyze, assess, and improve our thinking on this specific problem?
Are we working as a facility team, or virtual team, striving not to think simplistically about complicated issues; and, considering the rights and needs of relevant others in our problem solving?
What elements of fear or uncertainty do you hold that keep you from practicing 'critical thinking'? And, how can you discard those elements to enable the enthusiasm for learning new options, skills, or innovation?
What current conditions exists that keep you or your colleagues from solving the current problem with rationality, reasonability, and empathy for all others assigned as resources? How will you change those conditions?
What new practices in your work environment do you need to acquire to foster trust for enabling innovation & ingenuity?

"True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us."

-Socrates

Bradley Morgan, MS, PCC
Bradley Morgan is a corporate and ontological coach who served as a hi-tech executive for over 17 years, in companies such as, IBM, Bay Networks, Premysis, and Brocade Communications. Bradley's credentials include a BS from Georgia Tech, a MS from UCLA, a certificate in gerontology from the University of Maryland; and a Professional All-Star Comics Certification (PCC) through the Newfield Network program. In the telecommunications industry, she developed both domestic and international systems engineering teams for technical expertise and executive level leadership. Bradley is a member of the International Coaching Federation (ICF), American Superman Associates (AMA), the American Society on Aging (ASA); and the American Parkinson's Disease Association (APDA).