Have you seen the film "the big short"?
It's a film about the financial crisis of 2007–2008 that was triggered by the United States housing bubble.
If you don't understand anything about financial services, don't worry, it's has a lovely narrative and sense of humour through the film so that simple people like me can understand.
Watching it got me thinking.
Here we had a whole bunch of people, in fact a whole industry that is intent on proppering up something that is broken. And while, everybody knew it was broken, we have people getting rich off the back of other people's failure. If you hadn't noticed, I'm now talking about the marketing industry.
Let's look at the data
There is now 58.7% of the world's population active on social media, I talk about more in my blog here "The global state of digital in April 2022". The average person is now spending 2 and half hours on social and this isn't just posting photos of their lunch, but it searching for business that can help them with their business issues. I talk below about how companies that are enable by social and digital, buyers are walking towards them and placing orders.
The results are in, let's take a look at where we are with digital marketing today.
After all, your business is spending a whole load of money on it and you will want to know where it's going. Will it enable you to fill that pipeline gap?
Digital Advertising
Advertising expert Martin Lucas told me on my podcast, #TimTalk the following figures are engagement rates for digital advertising. You can watch the podcast here.
1.61% Facebook
1.91% Google
0.35% Programmatic (this is where ads follow you around when you browse)
That means that digital advertising has a 98.81% failure rate and based on the amount of money that is spent on digital advertising, that means that $265 Billion is wasted on advertising every year.
If you want to drill down more in the world of digital advertising, I highly recommend this article by Augustine Fou. He goes into detail on how money spent on digital advertising is paying for organised crime and terrorism. It would seem that digital advertising is more lucrative than drugs.
Of course, your marketing agency won't tell you this, but people didn't know that banks were backing fraudulent mortgages back in 2007.
Email Marketing
According to Hubspot, the response rate to emails fell to a record low of 2.1% in April. Said differently, 98% of our efforts to reach new prospects failed. For more information and the breakdown of this data, read my blog, here.
So what about cold calling
Here's a report by Salesforce that states
"At first glance, cold calling might not seem the most promising way to reach decision-makers. Research by Leap Job found that only 2% of cold calls result in an appointment, while the Ovation Sales Group found that the average salesperson prospects for six-and-a-quarter hours to set one appointment.
Research by LinkedIn found that less than 2 percent of cold calls resulted in a meeting, while a study Research by Baylor University found that only for every 209 calls made, only one appointment or referral was set. When we think of how few of these appointments will actually be converted to deals, it seems more inefficient still."
Are you backing your business based on failure?
It would seem that all of the traditional (legacy) marketing methods are offering something like a 98% failure rate.
In the film the "the big short" there was a multi-billion $ business backing the mortgage business, people were making a lot of money, they wanted it to go on forever.
The same with the world of marketing. There are lots of experts and losts of marketing agencies getting business to buy into things that they know will fail. Of course, the business will sack the agency, and get another one who will sell yet more strategies that will fail.
Before Covid, this never seemed to matter, people spent money on marketing, people made their number, everybody was happy. Then Covid hit and people still believed these lies and companies went to the wall.
We know the world has moved on, we know the world has gone social.
Now Imagine .....
Imagine, I pick you up tomorrow in my car and drive you to a place which is full of your prospects and customers. All you have to do is go up and have a conversations with them.
Remember, social media is, social media. In the past you interrupted somebody with a cold call or an email and pitched your services. As social media is being social on media, interrupting and pitching does not work.
If I walked up to you at a social event and pitched, you would make your excuses and go and talk to somebody else.
So how about tomorrow, I pick you up in my car and we go to a place where all your prospects are hanging out. You can stay as long as you want. All you have to do is have a conversation with them. It's that simple.
Related: The Pitfalls of Video Prospecting