How to Win at Marketing Both Now and in the Future
Everything has changed. We’ve got social marketing. We’ve got Facebook marketing. We’ve got a lot of mobile changes. Finally, mobile is huge and a lot of Facebook ads, if you don’t choose specific desktop placements, like maybe 90% of your Facebook ads are going to show up on mobile. That’s a huge change so things have changed dramatically.
What’s the Future?
If you watch that movie with Tom Cruise Minority Report, there’s a point where he’s walking through a mall and the advertising things are like clear glass and they scan his eye and identify him and show him a personalized ad. That’s pretty cool and there are certain billboards now that can detect who’s on the road. They’re working on that now.The billboards are going to be more customized to show people ads based on who is on the road. Maybe it will be connected to your car and all that kind of stuff. There’s cool stuff around the bend.
Companies Need to Adapt
Personally, I think that stores are going to have trouble keeping up with Amazon until they create a more personalized experience.
I was just at Lowe’s the other day and I thought I needed to buy a leaf blower and I looked at these two, and I’m like, “Well, let me look at the reviews. There’s no reviews. I don’t know if these are any good.” I went to Amazon to look at the review for them and while I was doing that I discovered they were much cheaper than they were at Lowe’s, so I left Lowe’s and didn’t buy it there. That’s not good news for Lowe’s or Home Depot or any of these places.They need to adapt to the fact that someone can walk in with a smart phone and look up information and then want to leave the store without buying. Very disruptive. There’s a lot of change constantly happening.
I think it’s bad when there are people out there who are saying, “You need to be on Snap chat right now.” Some of the people saying that have stock in Snap chat and they’re not telling you that. That’s not very responsible. There’s maybe one case study of people making any kind of profit with Snap chat (and they had to use Facebook ads to get that ROIL to happen!). Snap chat advertising is not open to everyone and those who’ve been on it, some of them say it’s not worth doing, so part of the problem with going with super new stuff is it’s not proven yet.
There’s being a late adopter, there’s being an early adopter and then there’s like prudently early and that’s what I believe in. I am a little skeptical and a little slow with certain things and by slow I mean like I was on Facebook doing Facebook marketing in 2011 not in 2009. I’m like a year or two behind because I want to make sure it can be profitable for my clients.I’m not going to recommend Snap chat marketing for my clients right now in 2016 because it’s not there yet. It’s not a wise or prudent use of your money, but Facebook is and Google still is for certain things.
What IS the Best Platform Right Now?
Google has become so competitive that you wouldn’t spend as much money with them now as you would back in 2005, so you have to be smart about which platforms you use based on how mature they are and who’s on them. Is your customer on there? And is there a proven system yet for profiting on them, which is why Google and Facebook are the biggest ones right now.
LinkedIn, there are a lot of problems if you don’t spend more than $10,000 a month and you can’t get the big, enhanced, personalized ads. Their self-serve ads are not that effective. Twitter, a little bit of effectiveness but a lot of work for a little bit of return, so spending a lot of time with Google and Facebook are going to be your biggest, best bets.
Thought Leaders: Guessing Vs Knowing
When you hear about Snap-chat or you hear about Blabs, suddenly Blab people just on Blab and they’re like “This is the next big thing“How can you be a thought leader and not embrace every new thing.” I’m like, “Because I care about profits and ROIL and what happens to Blab, they change direction and then Facebook puts out some features that are going to make Blab completely irrelevant. When Facebook has two-person live video, Blab is dead.”
All those people that got on Blab and said, “Blab is the next big thing. It’s amazing” were wrong because they didn’t really know that. They just guessed it was going to be and that’s not responsible. That’s not responsible in my opinion. Our job, my job I think as a thought leader is to tell you what works really well now and how you do that.
What’s coming down the pike? I can tell you this may or may not turn out but why would you spend all that time and money being an early pioneer getting shot in the back with arrows or in the front, wherever, getting shot in the head. There are a lot of people out there who want to jump on the latest new thing. They don’t know what they’re talking about. If you want to make money and you want to profit, you want to spend your time and your money wisely, you need to make sure that there are case studies of companies making money and doing well with that network.
