The best way to market your business has changed over the years. Content marketing was in favor for some time near the beginning of the last century.

Check the details here: https://www.copypress.com/blog/history-content-marketing/. Traditional advertising has taken over again. With the rise of the Internet, however, this trend is moving back to content marketing. The old days of traditional advertising and networking for your business were the prime drivers of sales but now things are changing. The Internet is a huge global network that is much more powerful than any individual networking group directory. Google, Bing, and LinkedIn have become the global networking group directory.  These methods are becoming or are no longer effective for you or as effective as they were before. Intelligent people have learned to do their own research before investing in just any solution that is presented to them. Digiday has a great article here on this: https://digiday.com/marketing/traditional-advertising-dying-thats-just-fine/.

A Comparison Between Traditional Sales and Content Marketing

Think of it this way, what is more cost-effective? Let’s say you are cold calling to find customers in the Internet age. So what’s the best way to market your business? You have hired an Account Executive and he is dialing away to potential new accounts, 50 – 60 accounts per day, as well as traveling to his designated territories. If the Executive is good, he closes 1 account per week after completing a 40-hour workweek, after 3 qualified appointments. That account could be worth as little as 1,000 over the lifetime of the customer or $100,000. But let’s say it averages $5,000. The AE gets paid a base salary of $40,000 and commissions up to $200,000/year so let’s say the average AE earns $80,000.

The company earns on average $260,000 or a net of $180,000 from the AE’s work per year.

But now we enter the Internet age. Here the competitor’s information is just a mouse click away. We can get a result in an instant. Suddenly all the AE’s hard work goes down the drain if the competitor is a better fit or our friends have a better recommendation. And why wouldn’t a smart consumer do this? Instead of having to set up an appointment with the competition or call them to find more information, we can simply search for the product we are looking for or ask for recommendations from our friends on social media. We can set up a blogging strategy or another inbound marketing strategy to automate lead generation, which once the fixed costs have been spent to set up, has significantly reduced investment to maintain as compared to hiring human salespeople to outreach to customers and potential customers.  

After all, we don’t really know this person that has approached us, and therefore the trust is low, as that person could represent a terrible organization since we only have an unknown person’s word to trust that the product is any good. Why would we do this, in today’s day and age?

There is online advertising, which is more targeted and more relevant than random people approaching, but again the same issue is here. There is no one in our network that is vetting for them, usually, and therefore how can we trust that they will deliver on what they say?

Currently, traditional, unpaid media articles or newscasts are the number one source of trusted information outside of friends and family, according to this publication according to the Gustavson School of Business from the University of Victoria: https://www.uvic.ca/gustavson/brandtrust/assets/docs/final–gbti-2021-main-report.pdf and offer traditional advertising opportunities.  Search engines are more trusted than traditional advertising, with online reviews being very important for trust which is commonly factored into search engines. Here are some facts about the importance of online reviews: https://learn.g2.com/customer-reviews-statistics.  Social media is trusted, but not as much as these other sources. However, considering the amount of time people spend on social media, and how quickly that attention is growing, the overall impact in terms of awareness here is very strong.  The best way to market your business is definitely not cold calling in this day and age!

How Privacy Is Changing The Way We Sell

Consumer privacy is becoming more and more important, and many platforms are losing the ability to target customers effectively since consumers can prevent cookies and data from being stored so that other websites or software can serve up relevant ads. On Apple’s and Android’s platforms or the same website for that matter, people are learning to ignore traditional ads that aren’t being blocked from brands they don’t know or trust, and that is why traditional advertising is becoming ineffective.  Adjust your “marketing” strategies accordingly.👍