For the past few weeks, we’ve been reading about the amount of video streaming of the Olympics that was going to take place. We were reading about the huge number of hours that are planned, who is partnering with whom and what others are doing to try to attach themselves to Olympics coverage. All this is being done in the name of driving traffic.
Now, in my CPG days, we learned that effective marketing programs began with generating awareness for your product or, if it was a mature brand, building on the unaided awareness that you had already created. The theory was that this awareness would lead to the trial of your product, the trial would lead to repeat purchase, and this would eventually lead to new customers. However, the key to this equation was providing consumers with a product that they liked and wanted to purchase again.
The Olympics are magical to many people, for a short period of time. Some viewers cannot get enough of swimming, gymnastics, track and field, etc. Having viewers come to your web site to watch the events or come to your site to learn what is happening in the beach volleyball competition is beneficial in the short term. If you want to convert these Olympics fans into regular visitors when this overhyped event is over, you better be delivering a product that they like.
If your day-to-day site does not have the energy captured by your Olympics coverage, your new viewers will no doubt turn away and return to the site that provided them with the information and entertainment they come to the Internet to get in the first place.
The trick will be capture their attention and keep it. How many of these sites that will provide Olympics coverage are going to have a dialogue with their visitors during this two week period to learn what they expect or don’t like when they come by for a visit? This is the golden – pun intended – opportunity to learn from their experience and keep these visitors for the long term.
So much time, attention and resources are spent on acquiring visitors and so little is spent retaining them. With this spike in traffic, hopefully some of the planning has gone into what it will take to retain these consumers that these sites worked so hard to attract.