Survive Tomorrow By Breaking Today’s Marketing Cycle
Survive Tomorrow By Breaking Today’s Marketing Cycle

Survive Tomorrow By Breaking Today’s Marketing Cycle

As a business, if you’re still debating ‘digital’, you’re probably dead meat. And if mobile and social are second priorities, you’re not far off. That’s the message the ever-energetic Gary Vaynerchuck (@garyvee) is sending to business owners.

A few weeks back, Gary dropped a keynote at ICON 2016 in the US with his signature straight-talking, impassioned delivery. The repertoire might not suit everyone’s tastes, but his doctrine must not be ignored.

In this post, I’ll take a look at some of the big points Gary made about the way we’re doing things and why we need to challenge the status quo.

“[Marketers] work on quant and transactions and data and short term business metrics. Not on brand and marketing and long term business metrics.”

Time and time again, we see brands writing off activity on social media and mobile because they don’t get instant results. Just like any channel, efforts need time to come to fruition. It’s crucial that tactics are continuously monitored and optimised because the truth is that most people are using smartphones and spending time on social media. In the keynote, Gary makes a great suggestion to anyone unsure. Next time you’re out for the evening, keep an eye on what people around you are doing. See if they are opening up Instagram, Facebook, etc. Chances are they’re not searching Google.

“I now no longer travel with a laptop, I now do everything I do on my phone. That’s insane to me.”

According to research recently conducted by Kenshoo, mobile is the biggest driver of growth in search and social ads which means if you want to reach these users, you’re going to have to go where they go; use what they use. Despite the growing trends, many companies still aren’t optimising content for the mobile experience. According to DreamGrow, “71% of social media users access their pages via mobile smartphones. The numbers are even higher on the iPhone”.

“You’re living one way as a human being and you’re marketing a separate way. And in that arbitrage, comes going out of business.”

Here in Australia, Isuzu Ute have listened to what’s happening and in doing so, they’ve seen a massive improvement. A conversion rate lift of 335% in just three months. Acting on analytics data that showed 40% of all sessions were made up of mobile traffic, the brand set about redirecting budgets and optimising pages to great effect. The work covered redesigning the mobile site, creating mobile-ready ads and conducting ongoing experiments. All stuff we believe in here at Reef.

“When you think about conversion rate and your funnel and your optimisation… please understand that shifts are happening quickly and it is super cliche why people lose: because they don’t adapt to market behaviours. But because you started making a couple of bucks, you don’t want it to go away…”

Blockbuster, Kodak, Nokia, Motorola, IBM, the list goes on. If you’re not paying attention and willing to change with the world around you, it doesn’t matter how big you are, you will fail. If you’re smaller, you’ll just die quicker. The paramount consideration here is that we are living in an extremely fast-changing world. It sounds trite to make that statement, given the way our lives have morphed in the last decade yet most businesses and marketers refuse to adapt at the required rate. They refuse to experiment. They refuse to innovate. And they do so at their peril.

There are more channels than ever at our marketing fingertips. This presents a ton of ways to reach and build highly targeted audiences. Those who continue to learn how, when and why to do this will still be here for years to come. Those that don’t might end up with the same experiences as the brands mentioned earlier.

Whatever your preferences right now, make no mistake about it: this isn’t trendy rhetoric, it’s happening – now.

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