We’re experiencing a perfect storm in marketing and sales. It’s affecting every industry and will change the future of marketing.
If that sounds like an exaggeration, bear with me.
I’ve been studying this for the last decade, watching trends and changes in the market. I first noticed it when it affected my own results in content marketing. But at that time, I assumed I was seeing the early stages of content overload as more brands published online and our strategies matured.
But then I noticed a similar effect in other areas of marketing.
In social media, people started complaining about lower reach and less engagement. Launches were becoming more expensive and less effective. Results from advertising and outreach became hard won. Some marketers even declared email marketing was dead.
I’ve had marketers reach out to me for advice. They’re doing everything the experts say to do, and they’re still getting an abysmal return on their efforts.
Three trends in particular are creating these issues, and there’s no escaping them. To improve our practice and find ways to adapt and overcome, it’s vital that we understand them.
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“Digital” Marketing Isn’t a Thing Anymore
The first trend is the maturity of digital marketing. This is what I was noticing in 2015, and it told me that some of our assumptions and expectations of digital marketing were likely off-base.
To understand that, we need to see how it compares to old-style marketing.
Pre-internet, marketing was expensive, exclusive, and hard. You had to buy time on TV or radio or send physical letters to physical mailboxes. Of course, that had additional costs — list buying, postage, etc. — that made it costly if you weren’t a master of direct response marketing.
Tracking results was also a challenge. There were no cookies. You had to ask people how they found your offer or print codes on mail-in order forms.
Because marketing was expensive, there were gatekeepers who decided whether your message or content was worth publishing. So only the elite or rich could afford to start a business, advertise, or publish.
The internet gave birth to a new way of reaching people. It was less expensive. It was new and exciting. It was easy. There was an adjustment period when buyers weren’t sure it was safe to enter their credit card numbers online — that seemed crazy. But as more enterprise brands adopted digital marketing, it felt safer, and people were able to buy all types of products from vendors all over the world.
We had entered the golden age of digital marketing.
Be aware, this is when most of the tactics we rely on now were developed. They’ve been honed and refined over the years, but we’re still using a variation of early internet tactics.
We built websites — little more than online brochures — and search engines to help us find them. Then blogging, email marketing, and pay-per-click advertising hit the scene. We invented banner ads, funnels, and SEO. Then social media and content marketing allowed us to market organically, without spending a dime on advertising.
We even invented holidays for people to do more online shopping. I save up for Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, and I’m probably not alone.
But here’s my point: We don’t distinguish digital from traditional marketing anymore. Marketing is digital.
And like traditional marketing, digital marketing has matured. It’s already become pay-to-play. Organic tactics don’t have the same power they used to have. Algorithms are the new gatekeepers. Google won’t rank content they don’t deem good enough and social media platforms throttle content that doesn’t follow their rules. Meanwhile, advertising costs are rising, making it more expensive to compete with deep-pocket competitors.
These are the problems that arise in a mature marketplace. But you also have tactical problems that grow out of our assumptions that “digital” marketing is somehow different.
It’s not.
Markets continue to evolve. New technology — like AI — continues to change the way we do things. New algorithms and regulations place constraints on what we do and how we do it. Which brings us to trend #2.
Regulation Is Limiting Our Reach
After the early excitement wore off, consumers grew tired of receiving endless unsolicited emails. They grew impatient with the ads filling their social streams. More importantly, they were beginning to realize how much of their personal data was being given away with every click.
The early days of the internet, which were a bit like America’s wild, wild west, needed taming. And lawmakers began putting rules in place to protect people from manipulation and fraud.
- 2003 – CAN-SPAM was enacted.
- 2018 – The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was passed.
- 2020 – California’s CCPA was passed, protecting the privacy of California residents.
- 2021 – Apple’s iOS 14 severely limited the data available to marketers.
- 2023 – Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, and Virginia passed their own GDPR-inspired statutes.
- Late 2023 – Google began phasing out third-party cookies.
According to Reuters®, we’re entering a new era of privacy laws. Until the GDPR was passed, privacy laws followed the mandate of “harm prevention.” Now, laws are being written to support a rights-based philosophy. Essentially, individuals own their own data and have the legal right to control it and who can use it.
After Apple’s iOS 14.5 update, 96% of US users opted out of app tracking. In January of 2023, 9.2 million Android devices opted out of personalized advertising. As of March 2023, 31% of US adult consumers said they used an ad blocker to protect their privacy.
For data-driven marketers, this was a death knell. With less data and exposure, marketing is looking more like it did in pre-internet days. We need to find new ways to get our message in front of the right people and measure success.
But that’s easier said than done in a slow economy.
Economic Uncertainty Is Stalling Growth
In a good economy, marketing is easy. You can execute badly and still get good results because people spend freely. But when the economy slows, people start holding onto their money. It takes skill and precision to generate results.
The trouble is, except for the 2008 recession, most marketers have only worked in a booming economy, implementing tactics that were developed for easy results. They don’t have the experience to design new strategies that can work in a slower market.
Organizationally, we’ve also become lax. The entire marketing function has become bloated. We have separate tactics for top-of-funnel, middle-of-funnel, and bottom-of-funnel. We have distinct approaches to product, sales enablement, and customer success. And some organizations hire entire teams for each marketing tactic: content, email, funnel development, etc.
That may work when money is flowing freely. But when it’s tight, the costs exceed the outcomes. Margins shrink, and the bloat eats into profits. Organizations have had to eliminate roles, tighten budgets, and work more efficiently.
Learn more about marketing in a recession.
Marketing in a New Era
In 2015, I was already seeing the warning signs. Digital marketing was maturing, making it more difficult to achieve easy wins. After launching my own campaigns, people would message me to ask if they were going to get a ton of emails if they signed up. I was offered jobs because a company’s existing strategies weren’t working.
Consumer’s familiarity with our tactics in combination with new laws and updated algorithms were making our job significantly harder.
But then the pandemic hit, and everything changed. It became a perfect storm that will ultimately affect everything we do.
Now, there is no “waiting for things to get better.” The economy may improve, but we won’t return to the way things were before. Old digital tactics were already failing. Digital marketing had already become the standard. Regulations will continue to protect people’s privacy and data rights.
We’re seeing the dawn of a new era of business and marketing. It’s highly regulated. It’s competitive. And it takes work.
Two pillars will help you navigate this:
- Efficiency
- A revenue-first approach
Marketing must be efficient.
We need to be able to do more with less if we’re going to drive results in an uncertain economy.
Marketing collateral should be crafted in a way that works for multiple use cases. This isn’t the same as recycling or reformatting. The same piece of content that makes a new user successful can also make a prospect sit up and take notice — if it’s written the right way.
This is real efficiency: delivering multiple outcomes with one asset. That’s not the same as turning one piece of content into 100 snippets of content. Continue to do that if you want, but it will take a lot of time away from higher value tasks.
Marketing must also have a revenue-first approach.
We can’t afford to build a list of tire-kickers and researchers. We need to find ways of connecting with qualified buyers and quickly moving them through the pipeline.
But don’t fall into the trap of tacking marketing onto the front of a sales pipeline. Lead generation for sales is the least valuable activity for marketing to focus on. You know this already. Most marketing qualified leads are thrown out by the sales team. Let Sales develop their own leads. That’s what they’re trained to do.
Let Marketing focus on activities that generate and protect your revenue. They need to be working at the bottom of the funnel and even below it. They need to be crafting the challenger story that attracts highly qualified leads. They also need to be creating awareness, so qualified buyers come to you, eager to learn more about your solutions.
Marketing’s role in this new era doesn’t change dramatically. But for efficiency’s sake, it doesn’t include low-value tactics or worry about vanity metrics. It takes a revenue-first approach:
- Deploying high-value customer marketing that reduces churn and improves your customer lifetime value
- Developing sales enablement content that pushes prospects off the fence
- Taking your product to market by putting the right message in front of the right people at the right time
In this new era, marketing isn’t easy. It costs more in time, dollars, and resources. It requires precision targeting, strategic messaging, and continuous testing and optimization.
But it’s not the end of the world. It’s a brave new world. And the ones who win will be the ones who adopt this new mindset, this new way of doing things before it becomes mainstream.
If you’re curious about how these changes will affect your business, let’s talk.
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