The modern marketing system is broken.
I take no joy in making that admission. I may have been part of the problem. But so have you.
But we didn't do it on purpose. And our intent was pure. Our motivations wise.
...At the time.
This is not that time.
But here's what's happened over the years: We kept adding and adding to the marketing stack, and we never took anything away!
Now it's just too much. For us, for our audiences, and for our limited capacity in time and resources.
How Did We Get Here?
It didn't happen overnight. When I got into this business, you had two choices: you could either pay for attention (paid media, aka advertising) or you could try to earn it (earned media was pretty much publicity at the time).
By the mid 90s, we all became publishers. We owned our own media, in the form of websites and email marketing. More channels...yay! And now we had total control over the messaging, pretty much for free!
A decade or so later, we were all flocking to shared media, or social media, as we know it colloquially.
These four types of media platforms came to be known to us marketing nerds as "The PESO Model," perhaps best described by Gini Dietrich :
Paid Media
Earned Media
Shared Media
Owned Media
The problem, as I see it, with The PESO Model is that it's still just too much for most small business owners, entrepreneurs and individuals building their own professional services practices. And with attention spans being what they are nowadays, where even a long tweet seems like a hefty pull, it's too much for the audiences we're looking to attract as well.
So Where to Start?
It's all too much, yet we're still trying to do it all. Or worse, some do none of the above, as victims of paralysis by analysis.
But we know what kind of ROI doing nothing generates: zero.
Trying to do a little bit of everything isn't the answer, either. You end up spreading yourself, your budget and your efforts so thin that the ROI curve again bends back toward the horizontal axis: zero.
And that's where it all falls apart. Too many choices, too many messages, too many places. All noise, no signal.
The worst part: Most people are picking the exact wrong place to start, overlooking the single-most effective marketing medium out there—the one generating the highest level of ROI across all industries.
And it's not social media.
Think about what that might be, and if you can't figure it out, I'll reveal it in next week's edition of The Fix!
That's it from me for now. Until next time...