If I asked you to think about “marketing”, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?
For most, you’re thinking of either digital advertising, posting to social media, or SEO, as though they’re the only 3 options that exist when marketing.
What’s interesting is that you believe these to be the only viable 3 marketing options because the agency industry has done a fantastic job of selling you this lie.
Up until 2010 – 2015, the majority of answers to the above question would have resulted in a well-rounded response that accurately reflected what marketing actually is.
Then something changed.
In 2012 Facebook launched the ability to run ads on their mobile app.
With this came unprecedented accessibility to cheap promotions.
Now, a business can get in front of the majority of their customers for just a few dollars and basically no marketing/promotional experience.
But, even more importantly, the low bar of entry to running ads (something which used to cost tens of thousands of dollars and months of development) meant that all you needed was a laptop and basic sales skills to convince businesses you were a digital marketing expert.
As a result, by 2015, the era of the agency had begun, and the world was inundated with one-man-band operators with a laptop, acting like they had teams of people working for them.
Acting like they could make businesses a ton of cash with just a few clicks of a button.
And it worked for a while.
Those who started early with Facebook ads were killing it.
And digital agencies had all the proof that was needed to show that this was the new way forward for marketing.
The problem was that those early Facebook ads days allowed advertisers to get in front of more people for less money, and combined with the fact that consumers were new to seeing ads on their phone and trusted advertisers far more than they do today, these early results had heavy bias.
So, for a decade, agencies ran rampant and convinced everybody that what they were doing was “marketing”.
No need to understand your business, just run some ads.
No need to understand your target market, just run some ads.
No need to actually do any work for the client.
Just run some ads…
And this brings us to today.
The lie they’ve been sold is so successfully ingrained in our culture that businesses will spend years jumping from digital agency to digital agency, hoping that one day they’ll find someone who will run ads that will actually produce a return.
They’re so convinced digital marketing is the only way forward that they’ll waste tens of thousands of dollars and still be absolutely certain that there’s no alternative.
I am contacted by business owners most months to ask if we do SEO.
When I sit down with business owners, or anyone for that matter, and speak to them, in great detail, about what it is we do and how we develop strategies, most people will respond by asking how much it will cost to run ads.
Last year I spent a couple of months, and several in person meetings, with a business owner who asked question after question about our exact process.
I took them through every single aspect – often explaining that we don’t just run ads – and the outcome was this business owner asking when we would start running ads for them.
It’s not their fault, and I’m sure that I could probably optimise how I explain what we do, but the reality is that when you’ve been brainwashed into thinking that there are only 3 ways to market your business, you use this as your reference point for any conversations around marketing.
Everything is filtered through this idea that the conversation is about digital, and only digital.
There’s a time coming when Agencies, in the way we know them, will cease to exist.
When people outside of the marketing industry realise they’ve been lied to and had their wallets emptied.
I just hope this time comes soon.
