How To Create Sticky Marketing

When Internet marketing experts create content, they use the term "evergreen" to refer to content that will be relevant for many years. They try to avoid using any kind of pricing or current events references that would make the material dated. Sticky marketing is a lot like evergreen Internet content. It is marketing that is relevant for a long time and generates the highest possible return on investment for the company that created it. A good example of sticky marketing is the slogan "just do it." It is popular, it has longevity and it is permanently associated with the company that created it.

How does one go about creating sticky marketing? The first consideration is that it has to be simple. If you think about marketing campaigns and Internet content that stay relevant year after year, the one thing they have in common is that they are all very simple pieces of information that are easy to remember. It doesn't necessarily have to be only three or four words. There are some full page white papers that are relevant for many years. But it needs to leave an impression on the public's mind.

The next thing that sticky marketing needs to be sustainable is that it needs to be associated with the company in some prominent way. The large corporations spend millions of dollars associating their name with their marketing tag lines and content. Small businesses do not always have the budget to do that, so that is where the marketing needs to be creative. People need to be able to see the marketing and know what company it is for. If people cannot associate the company with the message, then it just becomes a cute saying that people will occasionally refer to for nostalgic reasons.

Good sticky marketing is a call to action. It touches some kind of emotion in people that makes them feel motivated when they read it. An article that drives traffic on the Internet for years is successful because it has a mass appeal to people's emotions. It makes people feel excited, happy, surprised or some other emotion. People read the article and have to post it on their social networking page for their friends to read. Sticky marketing touches a nerve that people can always relate to. Certain groups of people will always get worked up when discussing sports or politics. Opinionated pieces about those topics tend to draw traffic for years and years.

Sticky marketing needs to be evergreen. News websites are forced to constantly generate content because their content is out of date so quickly. That is why many news websites have sections where they post evergreen content. If people can relate to the information in an article in any decade, then that article will be around for a long time.

When people create marketing campaigns or try to drive Internet traffic, the approach is the same. They are trying to create information that will last for a long time and continue to drive revenue. Sticky marketing, when done properly, offers a very high return on investment.