Is this how you feel about modern marketing (and the world of digital)?
(Of course this is the legendary Anthony Hopkins having a bit of fun if you haven’t already guessed it)
Marketing is broken, well almost! Most digital marketing is already 10 years out of date. Today, very few companies use digital marketing effectively, and that’s a great opportunity to position your business successfully in the next couple of years.
One of our favorite pontificators and doers in where marketing is heading (and what one needs to do about it) is Gary Vaynerchuk, here’s a taste of Gary Vee in action:
A couple of insights on why digital marketing has got a few significant problems from some of the experts and hefty spenders:
Ineffective tech platforms with questionable placements (toxic content)
‘Consumer goods company Unilever is threatening to pull all advertising from online platforms that allow “toxic” online content, as reported by Reuters. According to a speech that is expected to be made today by Unilever’s chief marketing officer Keith Weed, the move will encompass platforms that “do not make a positive contribution to society.”
Though Weed does not call out specific companies, his terminologies make it clear Unilever is referring to platforms like Facebook and Google, two companies that have been fraught with controversy over ad practices.’
‘Interestingly, it appears that it might not take as much effort for advertisers to at least start separating the digital wheat from the chaff. For example, in March, the New York Times revealed that JPMorgan Chase had reduced the number of sites its ads appeared on from 400,000 to 5,000 with “little change in the cost of impressions or the visibility of its ads on the internet.”
JPMorgan Chase’s approach? It first eliminated all of the sites that didn’t generate any activity beyond an impression and then had an intern review the 12,000 sites that remained after that initial filter was applied.’
‘Procter & Gamble Co (PG.N) said on Thursday it cut digital advertising spend by $200 million last year based on viewership data provided by tech and media companies that showed its ads were not reaching its target audience effectively.
P&G, the world’s biggest advertiser, has been at the forefront of a campaign to pressure digital media companies to be transparent with their viewership metrics by telling them how many people see their ads and how ad agencies spend advertising dollars.’
Developing capabilities in-house can make a lot of sense.
Ultimately, even as a small business, you want your marketing to be set up to work well in house.
There are good reasons on many occasions to hire external consultant/agencies/experts, as they work across diverse businesses/brands, they often see things that a mostly inward looking team is likely to miss. But longer term, the key people you depend on may move away, go somewhere else.
Also, the costs are bound to be higher externally .
Learn from the external expects/consultants/agencies, then bring some or most of those capabilities in house. You need to be tenacious and focused on ensuring you can develop capabilities in house.
Does that mean you will be able to do everything in house? Probably not.
Five things to do about it! There are more.
But here are some things that you can gradually shift in house from a digital marketing perspective:
i) Content creation, some of your small business team may be able to create a significant amount of your content production. Bear in mind that for an external consultant, they need to become close to your business before they can add value – that takes time and money. If some of your own people internally can achieve this, why rely wholly on external support.
ii) Video production can go part in house. These days it doesn’t take much in terms of equipment expenditure to create video content. With a bit of training, some of your internal resources can be creating your video in house
iii) Production of ads, visual, graphics. This is often an external cost, and a half way measure are the many platforms that allow you to save a lot of money by directly reaching out to creative talent. A way to bring some of this in house is to skill up your internal people to become more confident in terms of directly reaching out and interacting with the artists. This saves you in relying on more expensive organisations that often have layers of management that sit above the artists and usually are far more costly.
iv) Strategy sessions ought to be handled at least partially in house. Who knows the business best other than you and your people? This may take some guidance, but developing your marketing plans and strategy ought to be longer term driving internally rather than externally.
v) Specific tactical skills can be either partially in house or work directly with talented individuals (who cost a fraction of what larger agencies cost). There used to be a time that agencies were one stop shops for all your creative needs, and then they split into different areas such as promotions, direct, advertising, and then digital came along, and now they are still touting themselves as being able to do everything. But if you are paying one agency for everything, you are most likely not attracting the best talent, but a mixture of acceptable talent with a good management team that work hard to extract money out of you to feed their agency.
One of the key skills to developing capabilities in house deals with effective ongoing training. Train your people internally to have the ability and understanding on how to acquire the implementation talent. This avoids going through swathes of management teams who essentially get to decide what’s best for you.
Skills such as: talent hunting; accessing modern tech platforms where different types of talent offer their services directly; and building up your own bespoke in house team once you know what you want, are all great skills to nurture in house.
(this list is going to expand in the coming weeks, if you like what you read please check back for more useful references)
Here are 10 useful small businesses references for digital marketing:
1. BUDGETS – how much to spend:
“Marketers tend to love talking about the big, high budget campaigns. People writing up case studies are naturally drawn to big brands with big budgets, as they have the capacity to produce the ‘flashiest’ campaigns and assets. But investment in marketing for startups and smaller businesses is more important by volume, even though in each the budget is limited and every dollar, euro or pound of investment count”
Author: Robert Allen
Date: 9th January 2017
Note: Useful RACE planning framework for small businesses
Comment: Investment is always a necessity if you want to build your business, the real challenge is figuring out where to put it. For small businesses this is particularly tough, as budgets are so limited. Always remember, spend some time and money on figuring out which direction you want to run in before putting most of your budget into picking up speed.
2. TEAMS – how to structure your talent:
“Without an in-house marketing team or trained marketing professional, the depth and breadth of digital marketing opportunities can make maximising your budget difficult, as so much can be lost through trial and error. This is why many businesses opt to outsource the management of their marketing campaigns to agencies. Their return on investment is consistently greater as their campaigns are managed to optimise conversions and maximise sales.”
Comment: Even large companies with significantly sized teams are struggling to meet their skill demands to take on digital marketing. Not only this, many large companies are investing in marketing budget as if they are operating in 2008 and not 2018. Just the way they describe the job roles they are putting out tell you this, let alone how they spend their budgets.
3. SOCIAL MEDIA – what matters in social media:
“Consistency [in social media] is vital to make social work for you, so don’t assume you have to create a profile across all platforms. Adding more than necessary will result in sporadic, inconsistent activity, so focus on the one or two most relevant platforms for your audience.”
Comment: Social media is crucial these days, it’s no coincidence that Facebook has become so powerful. Not only this, it’s what’s under the hood of the Facebook advertising machine that is impressive, and partially explains how they have performed so well. Other platforms also have their strengths, but the worst thing you can do is pump out social media marketing effort and budget across a plethora of platforms and handle them as if they are all the same and will work in the same way. Treat Twitter, Linked In, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. all differently, and don’t necessarily be on all these platforms hoping that simply having a presence will make a difference.
4. SOCIAL MEDIA – how important is social media:
“Most small business owners expect to use social media content to acquire new customers in 2018, according to recent research from Infusionsoft.
The report was based on data from a survey conducted in October 2017 among 1,000 small business owners in the United States.
Some 71% of respondents say they plan use social media content to acquire new customers in 2018. Three-quarters of respondents plan to include Facebook as part of their social media strategy next year.”
Comment: Social media may seem like the holy grail for inexpensive marketing, but don’t underestimate the amount of effort you will need to expend to make a difference, and don’t assume that just being there means anything. Without a strong content proposition, your social media is less likely to have any impact.
5. SEO & CONTENT – the importance of SEO and Content:
“Your SEO and local search will hinge on your website content. Good content will attract traffic and place you higher on search engine results. Dated, badly written, or sparse online content—or content that isn’t tailored to your target keywords—can hurt you.
A general rule with content marketing is to emphasize quality over quantity.”
Comment: SEO is still essential, and you need to be sensitive to what kind of content you have, and whether it can engage and effectively communicate your brand values.
6. SKILLS – ensuring the right skill sets:
“The growth in digital tools available to small businesses has outpaced the ability to hire people to take advantage of those tools. 61% of small businesses reported trouble hiring workers with the skills to manage their social media pages. This lack of skilled work presents a drag on their ability to expand their businesses. Training skilled workers for small businesses may be an important business opportunity for digital marketers today.
When you think of small businesses online, one usually thinks of it in terms of a website. Facebook has dramatically changed how consumers interact with small businesses and make purchasing decisions. Facebook has emerged as a dynamic source of financial growth for small businesses. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Report titled, Examining the Impact of Technology On Small Business is available here.”
Comment: The skills shortage is still a major stumbling block when it comes to digital marketing. This is not likely to go down, given that today’s skilled marketers are struggling to adopt the next generation of skills already facing them.
7. MOBILE AND EMAIL – A channel that is becoming the primary engagement device and the Cinderella channel that’s still essential:
“According to GetResponse, social, mobile and email are at the forefront of digital marketing spending this year. More specifically, 59% of SMBs said marketing on social networks, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter will be the primary spending focus. The next channel projected to drive digital marketing spend in 2017 is mobile marketing (50%) — either app or web-based — followed by email marketing (42%). The other important digital channels include, video production, search marketing, content creation, data analysis and website maintenance. A report from Forrester Research, on the other hand, estimates that search engine marketing will capture the largest share of online spend.”
Comment: Email is still a powerful channel and will be as long as people conduct a lot of their business via email. Mobile is these days less of a channel, rather than the de facto standard for communicating to your customers. That’s why you hear the expression mobile first being touted about a lot these days. If you are not looking at mobile as a primary device for reaching and engaging with your customers, you need to look carefully at mobile usage figures in your market and see what is happening.
8. EMAIL – Email is still vital:
“The email renaissance will continue in 2018. Get ready to watch videos embedded directly in email campaigns. Technological enhancements in email clients will continue to lead to more and more email apps that support embedded video.”
9. VOICE & AI – new technologies that are going to change how things work on internet:
“For business owners the huge rise in voice search will impact consumer businesses more than B2B. However, both should be implementing plans to benefit from, rather than be left behind by this technology.”
“Artificial intelligence, or AI, is a significant force in marketing now. AI works by learning and responding and this power is being used in several marketing areas. Machine learning – the ability for AI to learn and improve itself without explicitly being programmed, has seen the functional scope of what is possible to expand rapidly in recent years. Marketing is at the forefront of AI use, with Google’s AdWords and Facebook both using AI to refine who is shown what adverts. AI goes even further beyond this in marketing.”
Comment: Voice is going to be a seismic shift in the way search is conducted, and AI is already being used by large companies, and likely to be an area of growing interest for small businesses as the technologies become more accessible.
10. VR/AR/MR – new exciting ways to experience the internet:
“Consumers have always been very visual, and now digital technology helps businesses make this visualization more powerful. For example, today we have visual tools, such as 3-D renderings, that construction companies and other businesses offer homebuyers to help them visualize what their dream home will look like when fully built.
There are exciting technologies on the horizon to take visualization to levels of stimulation, interaction and immersion. Technologies like virtual reality were once thought to be useful only for gaming, but they are going to be entering the realm of consumers and small businesses very soon.”
Comment: There are inexpensive ways of getting involved with this new technology, and practical applications. The market is still settling for these new technologies, but don’t for a moment imagine they are going to go away. If anything, they are likely to make profound changes to the way we use the internet in the coming years.
This is the best marketing class ever by Mr. Steve Jobs
Ok, maybe one of the best, but who else can deliver such marketing wisdom in a few minutes, and you just know it was completely right for Apple.
Take a look at this video, then ask yourself is your marketing sharing your core values:
If this makes sense, then you’re on the right track. If not, then you really need to think a lot harder about your marketing and what you want to get out of it.
Marketing always needs to communicate your core values, otherwise it’s most likely sales puffery for the sake of it, hoping it will generate sales, but who knows.
If it communicates your core values, then it is always useful, and it becomes a case of finding where your customers are and ensuring how best to engage with them.
Always start any marketing activity with a clear idea of what your core values are.
Digital Marketing for small businesses is often hard.
First of all, digital marketing isn’t easy for any size of business. There is a lot of waffle going on in digital marketing these days, with large brands that have huge budgets often getting it wrong.
Take a leaf out of Gary Vaynerchuck’s book* (or books as it happens). The main thing in digital marketing according to Gary is ‘content’ and 99% of content is bad that companies are putting up. So, even if Gary is half right, many businesses are failing dismally with their content. Gary is openly acknowledged as one of the top digital experts in the US.
Then there’s this preoccupation with programmatic advertising. You may have heard of it. Companies have been spending billions on it, and quite a few smart people in digital are saying its mainly a waste of time.
Then there’s search, paid and organic. Companies are spending a fortune on search and it’s getting harder for them to rig the results in their favour.
Then there’s mobile marketing, and guess what, very few companies are any good at it.
So if you’re a small business with a limited marketing resource, what are your chances?
Well, they’re probably a lot better than many of the larger companies who are so set in their ways that they are doing a great job in producing at best mediocre digital marketing.
Then there are agencies. Well, agencies are facing an uphill challenge keeping their clients happy, as many of them are operating as if they are doing digital marketing ten years ago. Guess what, if you are doing digital marketing that looks a year or two old, you are behind the times, so guess how bad you must be if your digital marketing is over ten years old.
Now I’m not saying that most agencies are bad at digital marketing, nor am I saying that most companies no matter how large are bad at it, but the reality is that it’s difficult to do well, and that’s for those with deep pockets who still manage to make as many mistakes as possible.
If you are looking at doing smarter digital marketing and you are limited in your budgets and time, you may have an advantage. You can cut through the bull and focus on what really works for you. The best advice is to work out what your customers want, where they are and how to really engage to them. Most importantly, stop selling to them, start engaging, and be interesting!
Ten digital marketing devilish sins for a smaller business:
1) Pretending you’re bigger than you are. Have you got aspirations to be big, but you haven’t got the budget or the muscle to pull it off. Not to fret, punching above your weight is possible in digital. However, avoid trying to pretend you’re a big fish in the big pond, as you will soon find yourself out of your comfort zone, and you will make costly mistakes. Fight lean, fight hard, and fight smart, but don’t fight like a bully, it won’t suit you.
2) Big marketing ideas, virtually non-existent budget. You know what we mean by this. You have this great idea. It’s going to be in VR, it’s going to look like ‘Star Wars,’ we’re going to promote it globally, everyone will hear about this, by the way, the budget is £100 or $100. Well, for that budget, you’re going to get nowhere, so don’t overstretch and think beyond what you can possibly do.
3) It’s going to go viral, I just know it. Well, you don’t, because the very definition of something going viral is it outperforms expectations, it goes far and beyond, and that’s hard to plan. Aim for bigger and better but don’t aim for going viral as part of the brief.
4) He’s an expert at everything, or she. Nope, that doesn’t exist. Nobody is an expert at everything and if you expect one person to wear numerous hats, they are bound to disappoint. Find experts in areas you need expertise in.
5) One size fits all. This almost always doesn’t work, there is no one size fits all, unless you are buying socks perhaps. You need to tailor your cloth accordingly. If you are reaching into another market, you need to adapt to that market. Another customer group, adapt. Another product sector, adapt. Don’t try and be the same everywhere because you don’t have time or budget.
6) What counts is my personal opinion. Well, is some ways it does if you are signing the cheques, but if you value your personal opinion over hard facts, data and expert advice, you are not likely to get very far.
7) I don’t understand digital, so I will avoid. That’s a big mistake. Your customers are there, you need to be there as well. You will lose a lot of business if you avoid reaching your customers through digital.
8) My Marketing Manager can do it. Yes, they can, but they can’t do everything, they will need help along the way.
9) My agency can do it. Yes, they can, but how much are they charging you, and how do you measure the value of what you are receiving.
10) I only take free advice. Well, you get what you pay for in this world, so best of luck.
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