How Is the Digital Age Influencing the Marketing Industry?
It doesn’t matter if you’ve just started out in business or if you’ve been in business for 50 years. If you are still in business, you need to take some new things into account. If you’re selling to a business, such as when you’re a business-to-business (B2B) business, this may be less required now, but it will definitely come into play as these young millennials start owning their own businesses. If you’re business-to-consumer (B2C) business, you need to jump on this now.
But How?
There are so many different ways to market to young people. You could be marketing through Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, and the list can go on. There are literally dozens of social sites that are all geared towards the majority: the millennials. Everyone can use them, but millennials are the ones that are using them the most.
So if your target market is the millennials (if it isn’t, it probably will become them), you need to be using these mediums. If you live in a world where your business is visual, 100% jump on Instagram and start posting.
Make Sure You Know Why You Are Posting
The old adage goes:
‘You can easily fill your car up with petrol and not know how the engine works and still get from A to B.’
The same goes for posting on social media sites. You can easily chuck a post up on Facebook or Instagram or anywhere else and hope that it’s seen, and that’s all you’re doing. You don’t know how the engine’s working; you just want it to get up and be seen.
You’ve been told that ‘you build it and they will come,’ so you’re trying to build other stuff to have people come, but that doesn’t work either most of the time.
You need to look at the psychology behind your customers:
- what they’re clicking on
- why they’re clicking on it
- the times they’re clicking on it
- the type of images and colors that they’d be more attracted to
How you can squirt a little sexy on your business posts to make sure that people are seeing whatever it is that you want them to see in a way that makes them want it, NOT need it. Even if they need it, you need to have them want it. It’s 100% important.
If you haven’t read Purple Cow by Seth Godin, it’s an impressive book and it will open up your eyes as to how you can make sure you’re selling a unique offering, and how you can make people want it.
Don’t Get Left Behind
Now, if you don’t jump on the technology bandwagon, you will be left behind and your competitors will jump on the technology bandwagon. If you’re not looking to get onto the digital bandwagon, it would be sensible to start looking at an exit strategy because your business won’t be around in 5 to 10 years, regardless of the industry that you’re in.
All of these millennials are getting their own businesses and automating things, and the technology that they’re using is absolutely cutting edge. They will rip the carpet out from underneath you if you’re not able to keep up with them. So you either need to make sure that you’re keeping up with them, keeping in front of them and using your skillsets, your experience and your financial ability that they don’t have to be able to stay at the forefront of your business. If you don’t, you’re better off just to jump out. Jump ship and do something else because it’s here to stay.
Technology Will Always Progress
The fax machine was a technology revolution and it changed the industry, but we’re not going to be bringing it back. There are much better ways of doing things. In 10 years’ time, what we’re doing now will be obsolete and there will be better ways of doing this. So you need to be on the technology bandwagon as soon as possible.
We use technology. We use social media marketing for all of our businesses, and we use it to show presence and keep at the forefront of people’s minds. A digital magnet more than anything else. A digital fridge magnet.
How Does Your Business Fit in Socially?
You need to think about how your business fits in with the social aspects of everything. For our business, we’re a B2B business, so it’s harder for us to bring a customer in through social media, but it definitely keeps us at the forefront.
The images that we put on Instagram don’t necessarily line up with the same images we put on Facebook, and they’re different from the images that we put on LinkedIn. The reason for this is we want to make sure that we have a different presence on different platforms because we know different demographics use each of the different tools.
We don’t want to give access to my niece or nephew or your son and daughter who’s on these platforms a lot to start doing your digital media marketing. That is a terrible idea that’s destined for failure. The same thing as I was just saying before about knowing how to fill your car up, is knowing how to put a post up. It’s not going to let you know how the engine works and how to make sure it’s efficient and effective.
If you let someone drive a car who has been driving for many, many years and who understands how to brake lightly, the car is going to be running significantly more efficiently and costing you less fuel. In this example, fuel is marketing dollars. If you have someone who just throws images up here and there and all over the place going gung-ho, shotgun approach hoping that something sticks as they flick mud at the wall, you’re not gonna have the mileage that you want, and you’re not gonna be running anywhere near as efficiently with this digital media marketing.
The Final Word
If there’s something that you’d like to discuss, maybe have a review of how things are looking, make sure your website presence is staying secure and you have all of your ducks lined up to make sure that you have a fantastic online presence, shoot us an email at [email protected]. I would love to have a bit of review, even complimentary review and see where you end up.
I hope this has been valuable. Make sure that you’re in front of the millennials before they become in front of you because once they take over, we are destined for failure. As I said, you’ve got the experience and the finances behind you, so use those to your advantage. I hope you’ve enjoyed this, and if you have, jump across to iTunes and leave us some love. Stay good!
