While this article is about Euro 2020 the football (soccer) tournament being played this summer. The article is "on point" as to how we live our lives.
Which is, that we are on social media.
Look at this data — The latest data on internet use, social media use, mobile use, and ... https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2020-global-digital-overview
To quote the report
“More than 4.5 billion people are using the internet at the start of 2020, while social media users have passed the 3.8 billion mark. Nearly 60 percent of the world’s population is already online, and the latest trends suggest that more than half of the world’s total population will use social media by the middle of this year.”
The thought that your customers are not on social media or your deal influencers are not on social media is utter ridiculous. Our buyers are on social media.
When modern marketing started back in the 1980s you only had a few “tools” available to us. Advertising, using the phone, so cold calling and the emergence of email.
The way these tools worked was simple. You interrupt me and you pitch to me your products and services. The sales pitch is also called broadcast. In fact most businesses, websites and most sales and marketing is built in this manner. You interrupt me and then broadcast at me. There is a problem with this.
The more and more companies used interrupt marketing (cold calling, email marketing and advertising) the more people who were targeted by these interrupts got more and more pissed off.
There is a whole industry that had grown up around stopping these interruptions. There is legislation such as GDPR, and CCPA. There is tech been created to stop these interruptions such as ad-blockers, even Apple and Android have cold calling blockers on their operating systems.
Now social media is not about using interruption techniques, so none the techniques of the 1980s on social please. In fact interruption techniques on social has a name for it. It’s called spam.
This means what got us here won’t get us there. But, deep down, we really, really knew this. So time for a new start based on permission.
Social media is not a glitch or a fad in business it is now strategic to the way business works.
What companies are looking at social?
It seems to be early adopters and the early majority. We are seeing change makers in companies coming to us and saying “marketing is working anymore”. It takes a brave person to say that. But many, many marketers can see that the old ways of interruption and broadcast (advertising, cold call and email) no longer work. Or you have to spend more and more money to get the same or less results. Where we see clients getting 30% increases in revenue with social. No other marketing method can give you that sort of transformational ROI today.
These agents of change know that pulling the same old, same old levers won’t get the results that management teams want. Sales and Marketing are in a rut! And you need to get out of it.
Get a piece of paper out and write down your company name and your competitors. Then write down your and your competitors marketing budget. You may need to estimate this. The write down the number of salespeople who and your competitors have. These are your levers. To win more business you need to spend more on Marketing than your competitors. Significantly more.
To grow faster than your competitors, you need more sales people than the completion. There is also a finite market, in other words only so many people making a decision in any one year. That means you need to win EVERY deal. To gain market share will require you to drop your price, which might drop you in the middle of a price way. This will hit margins and certainly not something you want if are increasing your spend on marketing and sales.
These are the levers you have.
But.
You could disrupt!
Our changemaker clients know they have to do things radically different to win.
Maybe it’s time to be an agent of change yourself and get ready to disrupt your market with social selling?
If you are that agent of change, get in touch!
This means that the social media landscape is open and ready for marketers to reap the rewards. Plus, with the potential for relevancy at an all-time high for brands who participate in euro-fever, social media’s CPM model is likely to be a very popular choice for brands. By investing in social campaigns on an impression basis, brands will be able to take a risk-averse approach with potentially massive gains.
https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2020/02/07/how-brands-can-score-with-influencer-marketing-euro-2020
