How the business landscape is changing

Life used to be so simple.  You pulled together a marketing budget, planned your advertising spend, designed the campaign and - off you went. One message to many eyeballs. Usually the louder you shouted, the bigger the impact. If consumers saw a brand running some “out of home”, or full-page ads, it seemed to them convincingly big and bold and they concluded the brand must be the real deal.

Then came the rise and rise of social media and the advent of the influencer. Consumers started to question whether that shiny billboard message had real substance after all. They wanted to know what others thought about the brand, especially people they trusted. Meanwhile, the numbers vying for their attention expanded exponentially. An estimated 50 million people now consider themselves content creators. in 2012 YouTube would see around 72 hours of content being uploaded to the platform every minute. Today, 500+ hours are added every minute. Instagram has over 1bn users. Getting cut-through on these platform is way, way harder. 

Covid was an accelerating factor too, since bricks and mortar offerings had to switch online fast, and there’s now a veritable tsunami of new entrants in most markets - probably including the one you’re involved in. With the aid of amazing no-code offerings such as Shopify and Squarespace, barriers to entry have become ever lower for anyone wanting to set up their own business. Facebook alone sees around 1M new advertisers using their platform every year*.   

Our conclusion? The market is getting saturated. You now need big bucks behind your marketing campaign and you shouldn’t expect similar levels of engagement or ROI even when you do splash the cash. According to Hunchads.com, in 2020 you could spend $20K on Facebook ads and potentially reach 10M users. Now the same outlay will only net you 7.5M. -  quite a drop, and likely to fall further.

This obviously presents a problem, but there’s a silver lining here. It’s forcing us to think, to get creative. Maybe it’s time to wrest back control from these immensely powerful social media and advertising platforms and become the captains of our own ships.  Ask yourself, what are you doing, aside from your social media engagement, to build relationships with your customers? How or are you involving your customers in the narrative of your business?  What are you doing to harness their enthusiasm? And if you’re still just doing more of the same, maybe stop?  Why not try something more impactful and with greater potential longevity? Yes, you guessed right, we believe it’s time to empower your customers.

Are you in? 

Join us next week when we will take a look at how consumer behaviour is also going through massive change. 

 *statist