Rethink Your Strategy: Interruption vs. Destination Marketing

Most ads and legacy marketing tactics promote a harmful dynamic of brand-audience interaction. 

So here's a different framework to think about two types of online marketing:

• Interruption marketing is when you interrupt the user in the middle of their online experience with your ads, pop-ups, cold outreach, or other unsolicited communication.

• Destination marketing is when you recognize that people are online with a purpose, so to get their attention you create content fulfilling their needs.

Paid Ads vs. Organic Inbound Marketing

What relationship does advertising encourage between your brand and your audience? Your ideal customer is online, trying to get from point A (a search or their feed) to point B (an answer to their question, learning something new, conversation, or simple entertainment).

In this case, your marketing is working to STOP that person from getting to point B. Instead, you interrupt their process and beg for their attention. Your marketing is functioning as a wall between A and B, an interruption.

What if There's Another Way?

Destination marketing begins from a radically different approach.

You aren't trying to disrupt or trick your prospective customers. Instead: you encourage them to find you.

Remember, your user is trying to get from point A to point B.

So you determine what that point B would be (what question do they have, what answer they are looking for, what do they want to learn or be entertained by) and instead of getting in the way..... you try to become that point B.

Visual representation of interruption vs. destination marketing.

Your marketing will bring better results once you begin crafting content that your audience will actually want to see.