Advertising Or Publishing? How Do You Define Your Water And Wastewater Industry Marketing Efforts?

Advertising water and wastewater equipment has traditionally involved two players. The advertiser wishing to expose their products and services to the industry and the publisher providing the publication and audience for the advertisement. But in recent years those lines have blurred significantly.

In today’s connected world, the advertiser can court audience directly through paid search, email newsletters and publishing content on its own company website. And as more and more traffic filters through Google search or social media “like and retweet” referrals, publishers are finding that they have to fight harder and harder to retain audience by creating great, keyword-relevant content to pull the punters in.

I’m not suggesting that the traditional model is dead. In fact, I’d argue that it’s stronger than ever. In the past, a publisher could mask the return on investment that an advertiser received because there were fewer options for the advertiser to reach its prospects and most of these were offline. There wasn’t the page view, user session and conversion data available today. So to keep advertisers coming back, publishers have to work harder than ever to constantly deliver a dynamic and engaged audience. And that’s a good thing for advertisers and publishers alike.

Most advertisers aren’t in the position to abandon publishers because they don’t have the staff or time to create a continuous flow of high-performance content to capture a sizeable-enough audience. As manufacturers first-and-foremost, investing profits in publishing rather than research and development, product marketing or sales distribution channels is still a long way off.

But let’s for a moment suggest that advertisers and publishers became adversaries. Let’s suspend reality for a moment and pretend that Water Online jumped into the submersible pump manufacturing business. And that Zoeller Corporation became a publishing business with a website for wastewater treatment professionals.

Zoeller would have a distinct technical advantage with years of experience building pumps. It would have access to specific test data, performance curve analysis and efficiency diagnosis but would struggle to convert its engineering expertise into digestible, audience-building content.

Water Online would lack the technical expertise that Zoeller has developed but would benefit from years of experience in developing audience-centric editorial calendars and having a staff of writers to tell a compelling story differentiating their brand from the other submersibles in the market.

It’s an amusing hypothetical. But as advertiser and publisher roles gravitate towards each other over time, the point of convergence will clearly be around branded content. It’s becoming harder and harder for manufacturers to win on operational excellence or unique product features alone. Thought leadership and customer intimacy are going to become ever more important in building and protecting your market share. It’s time to think like a publisher in growing your brand.