How To Hack Your Marketing Strategy

Great organisations don’t necessarily work harder than anyone else- they just work smarter; let’s look at the numbers and analyse some of the most effective ways to ‘hack’ your marketing strategy. 

I was doing some reading recently, and stumbled upon an interesting read from Small Biz Genius covering the most important advertising statistics of 2020. As I mentioned in the lead for this article, the most agile and impactful organisations out there aren’t necessarily working any harder than others, they just do the research and find out how they can work smarter. In the context of marketing, it’s important to first do the research and determine how you can best position yourself in front of the right audience, and then serve them something of value. Before I elaborate some more on the solution, let’s have a look at the scale of the environment and the problem organisations face while marketing to the masses. 

• The average internet user is saturated by 1,700 banner ads per month but sees just half of them. 
• Social media budgets have doubled worldwide; from $16-billion to $31 billion in a two-year span. 
• Average advertising spend for small businesses is anywhere between USD $9-10,000 a month 
• 90% of searchers haven’t decided which brand they’ll go with before starting their search. 
• There were 142-million downloads of adblockers in 2018 and 615-million in 2019. 

In many regards, the traditional notion of advertising is out the window in 2020; the everyday internet user is over-saturated with advertisements, and it’s incredibly difficult to stand out from the crowd. That’s why I’m a firm believer that you should be first and foremost connecting with your audience with something of value. While all of the aforementioned statistics are interesting, I’d like to direct your attention to the final two: 90% of people out there searching for your industry are sitting on the fence, and there’s more than half-a-billion adblockers installed on browsers, these days. Care to dismiss my point about the model of traditional advertising being a thing of the past? How about directing something of value to them? 

You can see by combining just two of those points that making your first point of contact something interesting and informative may well sway someone sitting on the fence, and luckily for your organisation, it’s also a great way to build up trust with your existing customers as you drip-feed them with useful information, and reaffirms your organisation’s integrity and reputation in the ever-competitive market. So then, how can you use this point to hack your marketing strategy? Well, let’s look to one of the best in the business, Neil Patel for some help. 

In his blog post, “13 Content Marketing Hacks That Will Help You Attract More Clients,” the first point that Neil makes is a quote from Jonah Berger, Associate Professor of Marketing at the prestigious Wharton School who said that “practical, useful content that evokes high arousal emotions (anger, fear, loss, pain, laughter and so on) get shared the most. In fact, when your content makes people laugh or otherwise feel entertained, they’re more likely to share your idea on social media.” You can see that if your organisation can leverage this to the fullest extent, your followers and their friends are essentially doing the marketing for you. It’s important to highlight that this phenomenon isn’t possible unless you’re offering something of value, something interesting, something thought-provoking or perhaps intentionally inflammatory to fish for a reaction; be careful with the latter, however. 

Some of the most effective ways to make this happen are to consider things like: does your organisation have an opportunity to capitalise on something currently trending in the news scene or in popular culture? Maybe it’s humourous, or could spark controversy in your respective industry. Have a look at the data and see which of your organisation’s blog posts or social media postings get the most reactions and shares; give the audience what they want. Neil also suggests that possible partnerships with influencers in your industry, adding attention-grabbing images and infographics and studying what time of day your posts perform the best are all essential parts of hacking your marketing strategy. 

While there’s a tonne of content out there and even more false promises made in this regard, there is one claim that can’t be proven wrong: if you serve the right audience with something of value, rather than simply bombarding them with a billboard advertisement, you’ll build both trust with your prospective clients and hopefully, a larger list of those clients. 

Thanks again for your time, I’ll see you in the next piece. 

Kobi Simmat.