Interesting article about how Marketing budgets are falling.
One of my team just shared with me an interesting story about how the world has changed. Hali-ma Kahtun brother is a teacher. He left his recent school and became a "stand in" teacher. So if a teacher is sick, you call up the agency and he will come and stand in.
He's just asked Hali, how would he be able to deliver teaching over Zoom? How should he create a personal brand, and how could he advertise his services?
She also has a relation who is a nurse, who totally interacts with her patients through an app.
You may not like this, but this is the change that has been forced upon us through Covid19.
And we are not going back, how ever much you hope.
Marketing Budgets Are Falling
The research in this article shows that marketing budgets are falling and in many ways I'm sure it doesn't surprise many of us.
Before Covid_19 we could spend money on Marketing and nobody cared about the output, now output is under the spotlight.
All the stuff about "Impressions", "Engagement" and "Clicks" really? What does it mean? (If you want to know, read this article).
We all know the world has changed. We all know the world is online and on social. Period.
As Simon Kemp says in his latest research
"With more than half of the world’s total population now using social media, now is an ideal time to rethink how we use these powerful platforms. In particular, I’d recommend thinking of social media as a layer that runs through everything that people do – both online and in the physical world – rather than being a series of distinct ‘destinations’ and standalone activities."
Marking Is Failing As It's Fails To Get With The New World Order
Marketing is too slow to change to this new normal. They think that "social" means ads on social, it doesn't, or ot means pushing out corporate content. Yawn!
Social is not about interruption and boardcase, it's about permission, it's about providing insights to the buyer, educating the buyer, empowering the buyer. This needs new skills and a new strategy.
The Scary Thing About Marketing Today
I think that many marketing departments know they have a tenuous relationship to value within the business. I have a friend, a Marketing Leader,who still does email marketing and he says "email marketing does not work", but he does it because he is able to measure the response and he submits that to the Board to show that marketing is “doing something". It justifies his existence, nothing more.
In sales, I have to sell something to be measured, which is the way it should be. But my friend admits he gets a “pat on the back” for nothing, certainly nothing that will move the dial in terms of leads.
Marketing Doesn't Work Anymore
My point is, in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king. Where an organisation is caught between what they did and what they know they need to do there is an area of calm water where nothing seems to be happening and I expect that many a organisation is in exactly that place now. No matter which way you cut it "modern marketing" and "martech" isn’t sustainable for any business and the sooner they recognise this the better or run out of cash.
The problem is though that in the move to social you can’t get a little bit pregnant. You have to make the decision and take the plunge. This company is hoping that the corporate-account-running-inmail-sending-automated-personalisation strategy will help bridge the gap between the old way of working and the new. But however much you want that to be the case though it simply won’t work. I'm aware of a marketing team that runs a centralised approach which netted barely more than 20 new targeted connections, whereas the sales teams that are social selling have achieved an average of 500 new targeted connections per person.
We have a client were one sales person has created the same amount of "clicks" on LinkedIn with one post, for free. That the whole of the marketing team did, with paid media for the whole of the last quarter.
The reason marketing budgets are being cut is because we all know we can get more for less.
The Role of Marketing
This doesn’t mean that marketing doesn’t have a role, but it does meant that marketing will need to take a different sort of role from now on. A role of guiding providing insights, empowering, stirring and reporting/measuring.
At a fundamental level there is a risk that marketing can end-up being seen as a cost rather than an investment because it used to be the case that marketing would create desire and qualify prospects and then those leads would be passed to sales.
And this worked because the buyer wasn’t empowered and because it was difficult to find who your competitors were and because there was no way of seeing whether you were telling the truth or not. “We are the market leader with 100% satisfaction guaranteed” would be a tough stamens to disprove.
Now of course marketing is in many cases an additional step between the salesperson and the prospect that simply isn’t needed because the prospect can find the seller and the seller can find the prospect…
Here we are in the middle of a Pandemic and we are burning through cash with little understanding of the modern buyer and what works in 2020 and that needs to change.
If you want to understand how you can create more leads, meetings and sales by cutting your marketing spend, contact me here
The net balance of companies that cut marketing budgets – the difference between those reporting increased and decreased spend – dropped to -50.7% in the second quarter of the year, from -6.1% the quarter before. It is the lowest level recorded by the Bellwether since -41.7% in Q4 2008, after the financial crisis.
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