Life-stage Marketing via Blogs

Blogs are not just for business use - while I advocate the commercial benefit of using such a publishing platform their most renowned form is the online journal.

Online journals reflect an individual’s mood at the time of writing and each post is read by someone that has some affinity to this mood. Targeting marketing messages to the content can be effective and highly relevant - no small coincidence that Google places AdSense ad slots on all the pages hosted by blog*spot, the Google owned weblog hosting service.

Relevancy is one of the key USPs for Internet advertising and has been harnessed to by search engine advertising products as supplied by Overture and Google for example. Relevancy is not new to marketers - we have been buying relevant inventory since before the Internet era. Through audience surveys we can tell that a particular characteristic lies within and we can then plan relevant advertising to that characteristic (e.g. is the way in which many financial companies advertising loans target to homeowners). However this targeting has been simple - simple in order to capture a majority of consumer rather than tailor to an individual. The individually targeted advertising can identify more narrow targeting such as a homeowner that has children or that is a recent graduate and thus has at least two major loan repayments - a mortgage and a student loan. What is even more interesting is the ability to target to these multi-faceted characteristic and the mood of the individual. This mood can identify what kind of product the loan will be spent on.

This kind of highly relevant advertising that combines collected information and the individual’s mood is life-stage marketing - marketing that is relevant to a consumer’s characteristics and the stage in her life. Blogs can capture the zeitgeist of an individual and can be used to channel life-stage marketing messages.

Nokia has released a new product called lifeblog - software that "effortlessly keeps a multimedia diary of the items you collect with your mobile phone. Lifeblog automatically organizes your photos, videos, text messages, and multimedia messages into a clear chronology you can easily browse, search, edit, and save." With this software - Nokia has both the collected information (via billing relationships with telcos) and the individual’s mood. As users of lifeblog browse and search their blogs they can be targeted by life-stage marketing messages which users will find useful and will forgive the intrusive nature of the ads. Nokia has not detailed any such plans to allow ad agencies to use their service in this way, instead concentrating on the commercial upside of being able to charge users to store retrieve and share these digital memories on Nokia servers.

Life-stage marketing can provide a great method for weblog hosting companies to monetize their services and/or support existing subscription charges. It will also help reinforce the USPs for Internet marketing which is always a good thing.