How to Make Your Business Prosper Amidst Digital Marketing Chaos

As for marketing, way too many marketers get into a rut where they do the same thing repeatedly and gradually get more declining returns. This results in lesser exposure and diminishing revenue. Generally, this takes place slowly and bit by bit until it reaches a turning point when the marketers, at last, understand that they need to take significant steps to get back in the game.

Marketing is undoubtedly a rapidly ever-evolving field. Therefore as entrepreneurs, we must keep pace with it to stay competitive and productive.

In the middle of this digital marketing chaos, it has really come down to adapt or die. The key is to proactively adapt eternally, not only to survive but to thrive.

The Devolution of Facebook Generates Uncertainty

There used to be a time when Facebook was like a dream come true for marketing professionals. However, if you ask about it from those same marketers today, the answer would be vastly different.

Soon after the social media giant rolled out pages for brands, marketers instantly got on board. They found out they could grow an audience base swiftly comprising highly engaged followers who’d view almost everything they post on their Facebook Page. It did not take much time before Facebook began compressing organic reach.

Fast forward to the present times; marketers are fortunate if their posts reach even 1% of their total followers ever. This has pushed them to bank on paid advertising to reach the audience that they had already built.

Nevertheless, these issues do not just end with the ratcheting down of organic reach. Even Facebook’s advertising platform has now become cursed with challenges. The social networking company has opted to replace the majority of its customer service human resources with AI, but artificial intelligence is not somewhat prepared for that yet.

Marketers who were previously pushed into paid advertising to compensate for their organic reach’s loss are now faced with another new and absurd problem. Facebook’s artificial intelligence misinterprets so often that despite conforming to the platform’s guidelines, ads get rejected, groups and pages get removed, and ad accounts get closed permanently.

Above all this, when things like this occur, marketers have nobody they can talk to and usually no way they can appeal this decision. This has led to numerous marketers, including the ones who used to be Facebook’s most vocal advocates, to entirely reform their point of view on it being a viable advertising platform.

When you take all of these into consideration, together with the not-so-quiet conflict between Apple and Facebook, the recent lawsuits filed by the Justice Department against Facebook, and the skyrocketed growth of other social media platforms, we can easily see why the company which used to dominate the market once is now losing its position swiftly. It is just no longer the paradise it was once upon a time.

From a rational point of view, for one thing, we never should have depended so much on Facebook or on any one platform for that matter. People who have been a part of the search industry for long must have witnessed the destruction brought about by the overdependence on one channel every time Google introduced a significant new update to their algorithm. Nevertheless, we will get into this in detail soon.

Customer Relationships and Data Are Crucial

The haphazard bans of Facebook on ad accounts, pages, and groups have made one thing crystal clear to the marketers that it is foolish not to possess your customer data. It is crucial because that’s how you preserve these relationships no matter what else happens with any specific channel. This has called attention to the significance of email marketing because besides enabling you to communicate with your customers literally whenever you want, it also allows you to export your data and take it to whichever platform you want.

Email marketing helps build a different relationship with your customers compared to ads because if you get it right, you can establish a much more personal bond with them. Here the key is, at the minimum, some of those emails should come from people within your organization instead of just from your company’s name. Also, make sure to write these emails naturally and engagingly.

This is the same reason why the number of podcast listeners continues to multiply worldwide. It is a golden opportunity for marketers to proactively leverage podcasts to expand their business, even with the skyrocketing number of podcasters globally.

When we listen to a person speaking, it builds a much stronger connection than when we just read their words. That’s the power of the human voice – there’s something unique in it. Owing to this concept, many podcasting giants have literally established their empires while hundreds and thousands of people have used podcasts to help their businesses thrive.

In addition to this, podcasts are mostly unscripted, meaning you are actually listening to the hosts and guests’ authentic and real selves. So now, one can easily make out how podcasts help establish stronger relationships with the audience.

Brands who understood this concept ahead of time had enjoyed massive growth and popularity amid this crisis when people craved something new, something which can fill the void created by social distancing. Nevertheless, the point isn’t to use podcasts and other concepts; the point is that no matter what the channel, marketers should focus on establishing and nurturing genuine relationships with their audience not only because platforms enable us to do so but also because that’s what people expect from us.

Diversification of Marketing Is Not Optional Anymore

Back in 2012, Google released their Penguin update without considering the collateral damage and ended up crushing hundreds and thousands of SMBs in the process. Undoubtedly, some marketers did use dubious strategies for link building. But many just got mixed up as false positives in a fanatic attempt to tackle what the search engine giant viewed as intolerable marketing practices.

Resultantly, the search engine immediately made these businesses invisible as users could not find them on Google, which back then controlled a vast 2/3rd of the entire search market in the United States. To clarify this: those businesses did not just lose their rankings for specific keywords; they were entirely removed from Google SERPs, meaning users could not find them even if they searched for a business by its name.

A multitude of companies had to get rid of their domains and go back to square one. In the process, they lost their years of hard work and marketing bucks, and many more were forced out of business entirely owing to Google’s actions. And like we discussed earlier, a similar kind of game is being played by Facebook with companies for the past couple of years. Nevertheless, this problem is bigger than Google or Facebook.

Numerous businesses had ended up struggling to escape from an adverse and hopeless situation when their main, or in some more unfortunate case, only marketing channel was plucked out from right under them, pushing them to start over from scratch.

However, to put things into perspective, we are in no way suggesting that you stop using Google or Facebook. When utilized appropriately, both of these platforms can play a significant part in your overall marketing strategy. What we want to say is that you shouldn’t get too dependent on a single channel.

Preferably, what you should do is leverage several marketing channels simultaneously to maintain better exposure and to shield yourself against the damage that follows when a particular platform vanishes or, even worse, shuts your business down.

Here are a few channels that you could leverage together for more extraordinary results:

• Organic search
• Organic social
• Paid search
• Paid social
• Video marketing
• Email marketing
• Affiliate marketing
• Outbound sales
• Print marketing
• Podcasting

The key to taking your business to new heights is to use, at the minimum, three marketing channels to increase exposure, sales, and branding for your business. Moreover, as an added advantage, you can also utilize these channels to build force multipliers. Further, when you have established a powerful position for your business in the market, you can start using other channels as well.

To put it another way, suppose you decide to implement organic search, email marketing, and paid social. You could encourage your site visitors to sign up for your email newsletter, utilize email marketing to drive social media engagement and searches for your business on Google (and other search engines) and run paid Facebook ads to bring visitors to your site.

When all these channels work together, they can help expand your email list, while simultaneously, the boosted social media engagement will increase social proof as well as organic reach, and the expanded branded search will help enhance your overall search rankings.

Diversifying your marketing in this manner will allow you to decrease or even eliminate the effect you might experience when you face significant changes in a single channel. In addition to all this, diversification of marketing can also make your overall marketing tremendously more successful. This builds a strong amplification where your results are progressively compounded gradually. And at the end of the day, results are your bottom line.

Wrapping It Up

The times are changing rapidly, and this goes without saying. The key to making your business thrive amid the whole digital marketing chaos lies in adapting proactively and consistently. Becoming overly reliant on a single channel makes you vulnerable to even the smallest change the platform brings in its algorithm or guidelines. Marketing diversification is not optional anymore; it has become the need of the hour. As marketers, we must adapt according to the ever-evolving digital marketing field. Utilizing different channels at once can help minimize or even eliminate the impact of changes to any platform.