The term “Drip Marketing” seems to be coming up more and more. Today Liz goes over what someone is referring to when they say Drip Marketing and why the term may not have been as popular as other marketing terms.

Episode 0311

What is Drip Marketing?

Sandro: [00:00:03] Welcome back to Liz and Sandro’s Marketing Podcast. We’re the podcast that helps your small business grow through all things digital marketing, including SEO, web standards, email marketing and more. Today Liz is going to be explaining to us what is ‘drip marketing?’

Liz: [00:00:19] Yeah this is a question that came up as Sandro and I were chatting and brainstorming.

Sandro: [00:00:24] My cousin actually. Sorry to interrupt.

Liz: [00:00:25] Yes. No, go ahead.

Sandro: [00:00:27] My cousin called me up and said, “Hey, what’s ‘drip marketing?’

Liz: [00:00:29] So we thought for all of the marketing newbies out there this would be a good topic to discuss. Drip marketing is a steady stream of content delivered to prospects. Now, this could be to customers as well because you never want to stop marketing your products or services. But again, it’s a steady stream of content. Think of it like a faucet. You don’t want to just turn the faucet on full blast for a month or two out of the year, you want to drip your content, your message, out to your audience throughout the year. You want to be getting your message out on a consistent basis.

Drip Marketing Content

Liz: [00:01:01] Now when I refer to content, this could be emails, social media, postcards, you know, a traditional print piece, phone calls, brochures. It’s not strictly a digital term and in fact I’m a fan of a multichannel approach to marketing so that could include social media, digital ads, perhaps TV ads. But remember, those tools and channels that you actually use are going to be driven by your audience personas and where they go for information. Now because there’s so much overlap in the different disciplines of marketing I think it’s important to note that drip marketing is often a component of content marketing and inbound marketing. These are other types of campaigns that have become popular during the last 10 years or so.

Liz: [00:01:48] Personally, I find all of the jargon really annoying. I think it causes so much confusion with clients. It’s frustrating to them, it’s frustrating to me. In my mind it’s all marketing. But hey, there are companies who have built entire brands around content and inbound and they’re doing a great job getting that message out there, so shout out to them. But yeah, keep in mind that I do consider drip marketing to be a part of that. You know, content marketing certainly has some overlap with drip marketing. It’s just kind of all, all fits under the big umbrella of marketing, so.

Drip Marketing in Google Trends

Sandro: [00:02:22] And you’re a big fan of content marketing I know. And actually in all seriousness, I had to look up drip marketing in Google Trends because I can’t believe I’ve never heard the term before. And it’s been popular for five years, it’s been around at least five years.

Liz: [00:02:37] Yeah. It’s a term that I heard years ago probably even before I started my business. But it was never a phrase that took off quite like ‘content’ or ‘inbound’ I guess because there wasn’t, wasn’t someone behind the term really beating the drum to, to bring it mainstream I guess.

Sandro: [00:02:56] And this led to Liz thinking we should set up a little quiz show to see if we can recognize all the searched, all the crazy terms…

Liz: [00:03:02] All of the random terms that we throw out. Because I admit sometimes I use terms, you know because I’ve heard them or I’ve read them and I, you know, I generally know what they mean. But I, I don’t know exactly what the term stands for.

Meaning of Various Marketing Terms

Sandro: [00:03:19] Like I said UTM and I didn’t know, I still don’t know what that means. I had to look it up.

Liz: [00:03:24] Yeah. Or um, URI, like I, most of the time I use the term URL. But I’ve seen the term URI and at one point I stopped, I’m like, ‘What does that actually stand for? Cause I don’t know.’

Sandro: [00:03:36] Or SERP.

Liz: [00:03:37] Yeah.

Sandro: [00:03:38] And we’re going to be speaking at a college soon so I guess we should learn these things?

Liz: [00:03:41] We probably should brush up on our, on our jargon.

Sandro: [00:03:47] Well thanks Liz. Now we know what drip marketing is. Well thank you Liz and thank you for listening. You will find us wherever you find your favorite podcasts, including Spotify. We have that link on our website. Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcast and Stitcher. You’ll also find us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. And if you have a question, be sure to send it to us, we’ll have our email link in the show notes. We’ll give you a shout out and a link. Thanks again for joining us and we will see you next time.