Welcome to the post-social media era! Now that Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have implemented algorithms to drive what you see, and have become essentially advertising platforms, allowing brands to buy access to your eyeballs, the utility of these platforms for their users starts to go down, driving users gradually off these platforms (or at least to value them less, use them less frequently). Facebook isn't going away, at least not soon (enough), but its actual utility to its users is in decline.
So that's it. We broke social media. On to the next thing!
But what's the next thing? How do I get my logo and my irresistable offering in front of more eyeballs, if social media isn't the promised land? I need a replacement for the 30-second TV spot, which has been in decline since, well, since cable TV started 30 years ago.
There is no next thing, at least, not one thing. It's all fragmentation from here: continued fragmentation of media, and fragmentation of the audience.
"Conventional" marketing, at this point in history, is essentially over. The way you've learned about it, the way you think about it, the way you do it. It's basically obsolete. Not that it's pointless. Not that you can stop. You still have to do it. But it isn't going to drive growth. It's just going to keep you in the game.
In "conventional" marketing, we think about sales and marketing as driving customers (or clients or audience, depending on your industry) to a product, letting them know about it, understand it, and convincing them they want it and need it. The product is fixed. The marketing is what makes them want it (and believe they need it).
The first problem with this approach in today's marketplace is that the perceptual landscape of your target customers or clients or audience is packed to the gills. Open any popular website and look at what percentage of the screen is now filled with ads. Do people still watch TV, or just streaming media? How many billboards litter the nation's highways? How much junk mail do you get? How many times a week does a telemarketer call you?
As an audience, we are in a defensive attitude from the get-go. We hang up on telemarketers, we skip the ads whenever we can, we install adblockers, we learn to look at the sliver of Facebook that has the smallest percentage of ads in it (and ignore the rest), we show up late to the movie so we don't have to see the ads.
As a marketer or advertiser, the only way around this is to try to catch us when our defenses are down... like outdoor advertising! Or with annoying pop-ups that we have to wait 10 seconds to close. Or by putting ads in surprising places... like on Instagram!
But our perceptual filters will adapt faster than new advertising vehicles can be conceived and implemented. In the race to get noticed before the human brain figures out how to ignore you, the human brain will always win. Humans are very good at ignoring things they don't want to see. Denial is programmed into us.
Social media, when it came on the scene about a decade ago, held a great new promise for increased social engagement on the Internet. And, for a while, it delivered on that. You could see what your friends were eating for lunch. You could fight over politics all the time. You always knew who had a new baby, or a new cat.
It presented an obvious and delicious challenge for advertisers... How can we engage with our customers, clients, or audience in this new realm? How can we stay relevant, and in front of them? The savviest brands dived in, and went deep, and created robust content streams, birthing a whole new field: "Content Marketing," creating a stream of exciting stuff and getting it out there all the time and thereby engaging their customers, clients, and audience. For a minute, it was beautiful, and a new marketing order took hold.
Now that's in decline. Why? Well, now brands can buy eyeballs on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, so the drive to actually be engaging, to actually create conversations, to actually care about their customers and not just flash a logo in their faces, goes way down. Make the logo bigger!
Of course, if you work in "Content Marketing" or some similar field, you will disagree with me here. "We believe in creating authentic engagements with our customers through content that is of value to them." Of course you do. That's your job. And you believe in it. But when you can pay a little money and get that content to more eyeballs automatically, guess what happens? The quality of the content, its individual stickiness and interest, will go down. The content itself can relax if you can pay to have more people see it. This is why articles are interesting in a newspaper or magazine or blog, and why ads are so dumb. The articles have to pay their way with interest. The ads are there because they are paying their way with cash.
But social media is not going away. It's now just one more tool in the advertiser's tool box... TV, web, outdoor, social, etc. It has become, for the most part, just like every other channel for advertisers. And there are a lot of channels. So how do advertisers figure out how to reach their audience, how to push their message out and in your face so that you notice it?
Well, first, you categorize your target audiences and profile them. You figure out what shows they watch, what stars they like, what news sources and websites they read, what movies they're going to see, what neighborhoods they live in, etc. Then you try to get to them by advertising there, someplace they'll see it.
But the fragmentation is real. Not just in terms of media, and all of the channels that people are watching and paying attention to, but in terms of the audience categorization as well. It is getting harder and harder to predict who is going to be interested in your offering. It turns out that people are not as easily able to be categorized as "conventional" marketing would have you believe. Everybody in their 20's isn't interested in the same things. We are, actually, all special snowflakes. And just because I'm a 40-something with a kid doesn't mean I want to go to Orlando on vacation.
So what's the answer here? Well, the answer is the same as it has been for 20 years, since the Internet achieved popularity and fragmented our attention into a billion channels. What's different is that we've just reached and passed the height of social media's utility (and therefore its interest) for its users. The answer is authentic engagement... actually connecting with your customers, clients, and audience... through the ether, across the miles, across time and space... finding a real connection. Not just selling them widgets, getting your logo in front of them, but realizing that you and your audience care about the same things.
And then guess what happens next... If you and your audience are engaged in an ongoing conversation about things that interest you both, guess what happens to the product or service that you offer? The product or service become influenced, determined, shaped, conceived, modified, refined, developed by that conversation itself. Marketing becomes not a process of taking some existing product that was developed in a lab and getting it in front of passive eyeballs. Marketing becomes a process of facilitating a conversation between people who are interested in similar things and who want to create something together.
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