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Was talking with a CEO of a business this week and she said
"We have no pipeline, no visibility and no credibility"
And from looking at them on social media, it's clear why. What we see, is business marketing like we did in the 1990s, which was all very well in the 1990s, but it's 2023.
What we also see is just more of the same. I was told of a business that was trying to pull business from their Q3 to Q2 by discounting. Here's a business that is will to give away $millions in margin, rather than implement digital sales processes. Where you don't need to give away all this margin.
By having a digital / social media strategy, your business will have
- Visibility – recognition in the marketplace
- Trusted advisor status
- Recruit and retain the best talent
- Employee engagement & shared sense of purpose
- Pipeline, growth and new customers
One of our clients is getting a 10,000:1 ROI on their investment in social selling. Just think, you give me $1 and I give you back $10,000. Just think about the impact that would make on your pipeline, visibility and credibility. Just think about the impact that would make on your growth agenda and revenues. How that would turn your business around.
But let's look at what people are actually doing currently in marketing.
Digital Advertising
You should check out this fascinating conversation with a Martin Lucas for my #TimTalk (my podcast) where he shares the following figures as engagement rates for digital advertising.
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 digital advertising every year.
None of us look at advertising or paid media anymore and we all know that if people are using paid media, they don't understand the world of social and digital.
“Advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable.” — Robert Stephens.
Email Marketing
According to Hubspot, the response rate to emails fell to a record low of 2.1% in April 2020. Said differently, 98% of our efforts to reach new prospects failed. Check out more data to back this up here.
Let's not forget that Hubspot, sell email marketing systems so they have vested interest to talk these figures up.
Website
Hubspot quote the average dwell time on a website is 2 to 4 minutes, see data here. You know as well as I do that we go to a website to make sure a company exists, we know all websites say they same. They all say they are the best, number one in the market and "buy my product because we are great" as we know it will say that and all their competitors say that, we just ignore it. It's just noise.
Cold calling
Data shows, see this Salesforce article, here, that cold calling has a 98% failure rate.
Let's be honest
If you are doing any of this "interruption" techniques in marketing, this is not going to give you a growth agenda and in fact I don't it will give you the pipeline that you need to feed your company. I certainly wasn't giving this CEO I was talking to, what she needed.
- Pipeline
- Visibility
- and credibility
Nobody, yes nobody would ever go to the Board and tell them they are going to be using methods that have a 98% or a 99% failure rate, so why are we surprised when this does not create the pipeline the company wants.
Related: Why Your Social Media Organizational Culture Has To Be People Centric