We need more campaigns - Really?, Tim Hughes

One of my friends had a meeting with her boss the other week and he shouted at her

" we need more campaigns"

While the shouted was very disrespectful it also reflected the businesses desperation for more pipeline.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. These words are usually credited to the acclaimed genius Albert Einstein.

I asked the question of my friend, "why did the leadership keep insisting in campaigns and using techniques that don't work anymore?" "Surely your leadership they realise we live in the second decade of the 21st century?"

"It would seem not", was my reply.

Let's walk through the different options (campaigns) this business has and let's be honest with the likely output.

Your prospects are now active online

If we look at the latest research from Hootsuite and We Are Social, here, there are now 4.48 billion people active on social media, that is 56.8% of the world's population. That's a year on year increase of 13.1%, or put it another way 520 million people have joined social media in the last year. If you take out of that the old and the young, from a B2B prospective, all your prospects and customers are online.

The average person (your prospects and customers) are spending 2 hours and 24 minutes active on social media.

The old paradigms of marketing are over

Current Marketing isn't working anymore - who says Gartner!

In this webinar Gartner share research that states that

"64% of B2B customers cannot tell brands apart"

"Humans spend 10 seconds or less viewing web pages regardless of quality"

"76% of B2B customers do nothing once they see the brand experience"

Let's look at the current marketing activities one by one and see what the research says for all of them

Advertising

We see figures that the spend of advertising is increasing and it is. The reason for this, is it just doesn't work, so people have to try and spend more to get it work.

We all spend our day trying to keep away from brands putting their message in front of us.

Back in the 70s, it was reported that the average person saw between 500 to 1600 ads per day. Without online marketing being a thing back then, most ads could be found on billboards, in newspapers, and on TV promoting the latest products.

Fast forward to 2021, and although there are no official figures, the average person is now estimated to encounter between 6,000 to 10,000 ads every single day.

There is no way that you as a brand will be seen by your prospects or customers.

We also know we are being scammed by big tech as to the way they measure advertising

How does Facebook measure an ad impression? - Ads Counted At ‘Greater Than Zero Pixels And Greater Than Zero Seconds’ see the Forbes article here.

Email marketing

According to this article from The Drum, "According to Hubspot, the response rate to emails fell to a record ... Said differently, 98% of our efforts to reach new prospects failed."

Let's just confirm that, according to Hubspot and they sell email marketing systems so they have a vested interest to talk up email marketing, confirm that email marketing has a 98% failure rate.

Cold Calling

In case you missed it, the Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch have banned cold calling and have moved all their people to social selling. This isn't some trendy tech company that might have decided to do this on a whim, this is a very conservative financial services company that has made a decision based on data.

But surely cold calling has a better ROI than social selling? Not according to Merrill Lynch.

"They will also be encouraged to contact prospects over LinkedIn, which has a higher hit rate than cold calling"

With all of these legacy sales methods no longer working, people are switching to social selling.

Why? Because of the great case studies and great returns.

Social selling is not about spamming people on social, that's spamming people on social.

Social is using the DLA Ignite methodology to have a buyer centric profile, build a network and to share insightful content.

As Forrester say in this article

"62% of buyers say they can finalize their purchase selection criteria based solely on digital content. That means your content must fill that interaction gap — or your competitors’ will.

But battling for numerical content superiority means nothing if your content isn’t relevant or interesting to buyers."

So who's social selling?

The CRO (chief revenue officer), Richard Eltham of Namos Solutions, of one of clients posted a comment on LinkedIn about social selling. See here.

“Social selling is not an option now it is the way of the world and you either learn and execute it or fear getting left behind”

Kevin Murray who is the Head of Sales at MacArtney Underwater Technology recently posted about his success with social selling here and wrote an article about the transformation that has happened in sales here.

I don't believe you Tim!

If you check out this video of Chris Mason CEO at Oracle reseller Namos, fast forward to 19 minutes 55 seconds. Chris talks about a $2.6 million win from being on social, after completing the DLA Ignite social selling and influence course.