Ever hear the expression “one eye on the past, one eye on the future”? Essentially that’s what you need to be doing when it comes to marketing. Keep an eye on the past to see how it’s changed and keep an eye on the future to know what’s coming.
Marketing seems to be in a constant state of change, so how else do you keep yourself grounded? Right now there are about 8.4x as many ads being created, they are about 3x more expensive, and people are receiving around 3,000 ad messages per day in the Midwest. If you are in large cities such as New York, Chicago or LA that number increased to 8,000 ad messages per day.
So how do you keep ahead of the curve and be ready for the future?
First, you need to keep one eye on the past. Print advertising was huge back in the day, no one can deny it; currently it’s down 45% since 2006. Local TV watching is even slowly becoming part of the past with only 28% of 35 and younger watching. The yellow page industry as we know it is extinct. Starting in 2016 the yellow page industry made the majority of their revenue in the digital space. The Internet is taking over media with the average person spending 29 hours/week online.
That is not to say all of those mediums are dead, they are just changing. Your business is required to change along with them.
With that knowledge, it’s time to get ready for the future when it comes to marketing. It’s important to know that behavior based ads are up 600% since 2012 (yeah, you read that percentage right), 86% of companies are using content marketing, and those companies that are using an active online voice generates 67% more leads per month. In a recent study over 50% of Facebook and Twitter users get their news through social channels and that was before the fake news that dominated the political season.
So, how do you balance the future and the past? Two words: value & strategy.
Collect raving fans that care about you and your company. Share with them only valuable content, not your sales content. What do they want to read? What do they need to know? Educate them on the market, your industry or anything that interests them for that matter. Keep giving them high quality content and value over and over again.
Once a relationship and trust is developed, that’s when you ask to them to buy. Show them and build up enough value and how could they say no? If you ask to buy too soon they will reject you just like you reject the sleazy old school car salesman.
This all plays into one of the best definitions of brands I have ever seen which is ‘Branding is anything that makes a deposit into a customer or prospect’s relational equity account.’
It is not about you, it is about them. All about them. If you put enough deposits into a customer’s account, when you ask them to buy they will give it to you because you have gave them value along the way. Don’t rob your clients by not making any deposits. Give.
That alone will revolutionize your business.
