by Tim Hughes | @Timothy_Hughes | LinkedIn
2018 was interesting for us, more and more Marketing Leaders came to us and said Marketing isn’t working anymore. We also saw more and more Marketing Leaders that hadn’t grasped the change, and we heard they are being fired.
It’s worth saying that thinking “digital marketing” means a bunch of old world activities merged in with an email list and Facebook ads will soon realise they are on the wrong side of the argument.
We were called in to help a company that had just fired their Marketing Director. By the way, this isn’t what we do, but we are becoming more and more involved in helping companies grappling with the new world order. But we are happy helping our clients, rolling out our Social Marketing as well as our Social Human Resources (HR) programs.
Let’s put a marker in the ground. Advertising does not work, email marketing, cold calling and any form of interruption and broadcast marketing does not work! It’s interesting that Mark Schaefer also says this in his new book “Marketing Rebellion” and when the world’s best Marketing thought leaders says this, you have to sit up and listen.
Let me qualify that, we are all busy people, we just don’t have the time or the inclination to process all the messages that get thrown at us everyday. So we filter them out. We filter them out through technology, ad-blocker usage grows at 30% year-on-year, we have spam filters on our email and if you spam me I will create a rule that in future your email will just go straight into my delete box. Same on my iPhone, cold call me once and I just block you. Now, I’m not an outlier here, everybody I talk to does this. Add to this we have legislation that enables us to filter all this noise out. GDPR enables us to stop all push marketing and push selling, we can just invoke our “right to remain forgotten”. A marketing strategy based on any form of outbound marketing is now a fools paradise and a sure fire (no pun intended) of you needing to look for another job.
To give you an example, a company that had pulled us in (they had just fired the marketing Director) had spent money on Conferance’s (zero leads), telesales (zero leads), a website upgrade (zero impact on demand generation) and was about to buy some lists to create an email database. The Marketing Director had also changed the CRM that had no impact either. We have a saying in the UK when things don’t work and you change things hoping that things will change, which is “shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic”. The Titanic being a ship that was pronounced un-sinkable, it hit an iceberg and sank.
(In case you don’t know it does not matter if people opted in to the lists you buy for GDPR purposes. You still have to get opt-in yourself or you are not GDPR compliant. So, pretty much a waste of time, as nobody will opt in.)
Now you will always find somebody who will tell you, we ran this campaign and therefore it works. A friends mother died last year, she was a wonderful woman, kind, supportive, hard working. She was also a life long smoker, she died at 95. Using the logic of “I know one campaign that worked” we should all smoke as it all proves we will live a long time.
2018 has also been a great year for us as we moved from early adopter to middle majority in terms of companies.
Development being :-
2006 – First instance of the term Social Selling being used.
2013, 2014 and 2015 was rolling out Social Selling in my previous company. With a roll out across 4,000 people in Europe this tested what worked and what didn’t (profile writing and webinars).
2015 – I wrote the book “Social Selling – Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers” at weekends.
2016 and 2017 – Book became a best seller and was adopted by sales people and Universities globally as the way to engage with the modern buyer.
2017 – As a business we signed our first deals and implemented our first sales transformations. There were early adopter companies.
2018 – We sold to middle majority companies using the early adopter sites as references. We also built out our global capability. We are now the only company that can roll out social selling, both locally and globally.
Where as in the early days people transformed to social selling because it felt right, now we can show real results. A classic more, for less business case.
People who read this article also read these:
https://dlaignite.com/why-your-marketing-is-very-seriously-broken/
https://dlaignite.com/why-using-profile-writers-is-not-social-selling/
https://dlaignite.com/is-video-marketing-really-an-immaculate-conception/
