It was only until yesterday that digital marketing approach sounded sleek and a cake walk to achieve better results.
A casual tweet on Twitter enquiring something would pour in many replies on your wall in less than few minutes. Your blog post received great reviews and comments and was shared and reshared without much of an effort. When only a couple of articles on LinkedIn would reach out to your target audience and generate leads for your business.
If you have been in the marketing business and fiercely employing digital marketing for some time now, you would certainly know that what worked up until last year has stopped being relevant in current trends.
There are many small business owners and entrepreneurs who have a common complain that their current marketing approach is not generating any leads or compelling enough to engage the consumers. They can’t figure out the marketing tactics that work optimum to the degree of reach or repeatability.
What worked before doesn’t now
Initially few social media postings would give better rate of return but even after being actively posting on social media businesses find it difficult to attain results (whatever was their description of ‘rate of return’ must be). It was not long ago when sending customers one newsletter a month was good enough to gain some traction. At present, most businesses agree that they need to send top-quality content weekly, if not more in order to remain top-of-mind with their audience.
Small businesses with confined marketing budget and lesser resources it will sound crazy and for those in mid-size business to enterprise scale it is truly non-sustainable.
In that case, what is the solution? Why are your marketing tactics not being able to give results like they would before?
So, the question itself hints to the answer to it: because they are tactics.
Tactics need to change constantly if not Strategy
Until a couple of years back, a casual display ad in the business directory would develop prospects and generate new clients at a very nominal price. Now, after the dawn of digital era the printed version of business pages also cease to exist. The business happens only online.
It might sound funny about some of the crazy stuff marketers did a few years ago – email spam, telesales, banner ads, or suspect SEO practices. However, the truth is these things worked for those times. Then they no longer did.
Same thing applies even today.
Today, same as yesterday, the world of marketing is again witnessing a profound evolution. Things that worked yesterday will not work as well today. But that also means there are new tactics to deploy.
Constantly Re-invent Marketing
Marketing tactics cannot be the ones used before, for a simple reason that customer behavior has changed dramatically. So, staying the same will not help.
Again, it is not something to grieve upon – should be the other way. It is a matter of celebration.
For those who want to stay gloomy on the changing consumer behavior and fail to realize it and continue using banner ads, the outcome will be disappointing. There are many hanging on to hopeless optimism rather than embracing the change.
People who understand that tactics change, if not strategy. Tactics are not the destination – but the journey you undertake. For e.g. If tomorrow you drive to work – whether in an electric car or a diesel, does it really matter?
Well, so you do understand the crux of this. Your marketing is not working, and you understand why. In that case: what do you require now to do to reach out to those people looking to buy what you sell?
Single tactic will not do the wonders
Firstly, trying to swing the game in your favor has less chance of working now than ever before.
If one of your tactics in customer acquisition process is to fool around with Facebook algorithms, out-smart the Twitter bots and message blast Instagram and Snapchat, then you are definitely on the wrong side of marketing tactic, causing damage that cannot be undone.
There is no single magic marketing tactic. Only because your competitor has tried a new marketing tactic, it makes no sense for you to follow that without weighing the options. It might not have done wonders for them too. The looming challenge is consumers are blitzed with ads and posts that has resulted in a very finite attention span.
To counter that, consumers have become very selective over what warrants their attention. The daunting task of today’s marketers is not about merely win the audience attention: rather they need to earn it.
In older days, advertising had us watching our favorite TV show, only to be interrupted regularly by brands, ad breaks. It’s not the same anymore, whenever there is a break we either flip the channel or shift focus to our smartphones.
People do not give advertisers the attention anymore their business model was based upon from past 50-70 years.
Yet major amount of marketing is still based on the presumption of having audience attention. Today that is no longer the case.
Marketers should Meet Audience Expectations
The strategy or tactics needed to successfully market your business can not be found in a book, at a conference, or in some corner office of marketing gurus. What works today – which worked yesterday, and will work tomorrow – is grassroots, person-to-person, authentic, transparent actions. Actions that have always worked to grow businesses. Businesses just like yours.
Efficient marketing is not about blindly embracing a piece of technology, being clever, or winning awards. Channels and tactics may evolve and change, but ultimately, it must still appeal to basic human emotions to remain relevant, competitive and sell what you offer.
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