Why Timing is Killing Your Marketing Efforts
Here we are working away creating content in hopes it will be amazing and targeted, data-driven, and polished on the latest greatest platform gaining attention and converting leads… Problem is for many it is a waste of time. Watch out Debbie downer, not really but I am a marketing analyst and because of that I have a tough story to tell. Your smart and hard effort and all the talents that go into them are being wasted because timing is killing your efforts. Let me explain.
Consumption Over Delivery
Marketing in all its glory is done before the consumer gets it. The talent, the concept, strategy, budget, time, and execution all happen before a single eye sees the content, before a moment of attention is earned. The world attention economy has changed and as nice as it is to laugh it off and continue creating ‘the amazing’ in the labs, we have to go beyond acknowledgment and start playing by the new rules of marketing. The fact is that we used to focus on delivering great marketing with little regard to the consumption. We figured that if we build it they will consume it. This way of marketing is dying, and the birds keep flying into the window.
The only thing that matters now is consumption. Did you customer even see it. Not did you post it and they are following you, but did they see it. This isn’t the 50s and we aren’t sitting around as a family focused on listening to the radio because it’s the most exciting thing. We are in environments of constant distraction and options. Old school marketing counted on uninterrupted attention, it was like water out of the tap that would never end. Well, it’s post apocalyptic marketing world now, welcome to the Thunderdome.
A Drilldown of Attention
So let’s see what the real problem is. You send a post on your social media talking about your great product or service. Your prospect is following you on Twitter, but also has 85 other apps on her phone, she only uses about 7 on the regular. On each of the 7 she has 100 people she is following, she is a lite user. You are now 1 in 700 people trying to talk to her. Oops, she was looking at Snapchat when you tweeted, then your Tweet got buried when 9 other of her 100 tweeted at the same time. She also got 3 new emails, and a text, oh and she has a job and is getting ready for her lunch break. Hold on she has to go to the bathroom so she put her phone down for a minute. Co-worker said hi :] she looks at her meaning she is not looking at her phone. She went to look at your profile because you mean so much to her, but her boss just emailed her, she saw the notification. Got to get back to work, she just got the meme from her friend, checked email again worried about the last email from her boss. She saw her favorite show is trending hold up what is that about… remembering her husband wants her to pick up take out after work, thinks,these shoes are uncomfortable. And on and on.
This happens all day long and your 5 second window you shared your post just wasn’t the most important thing in the universe, or maybe never got saw. Meanwhile marketers on the other side are wondering why conversions suck or there is only 1 retweet if you have 5,000 followers. There is so much competition for attention that it is literally a needle in a haystack. Who can save us? The same thing that got us in some of this trouble, technology.
Marketing has to Get Smarter
The sad thing about timing is it is the one thing that even if you get everything else right, it can render all the work useless. Interrupting people more is not helping, it is training the consumer to get so good at ignoring and switching focus that they become almost impossible to reach. Is there hope? Yes, the same thing that took away our great undistracted consumer can help us find a way back into their attention stream. Artificial intelligence and big data can help us find the context of our customers.
The fact is that Sally buyer is habitual, not in a way you might notice on the surface, but in a way machine learning could notice over a large set of data. See, Sally buys shoes on Thursdays and Tuesdays and never on Sundays. Sally buys them between 3–5pm and come to find out it is on those days she goes to the gym and has less work stressing her out. Over the last 4 years she has bought shoes from these 3 sites and 2 of those were on mobile when she was at home and one on a tablet. She has never bought shoes away from her home or on her desktop at home. She also never bought shoes from these brands or in these colors. 100% of her purchases were shoes on sale of at least 30% off. Finally, her shoe purchases have averaged 3.4 months in between purchases.
So you send an ad on Thursday at 4pm from her favorite brands with a 30% off sale 3.3 months after her last purchase on her mobile while she is at home. You don’t need to hound her for 2–3 months on channels she isn’t paying attention to interrupting shows, chats with friends, or emails. That costs you time and money and produces nothing but disappointing metrics. I am working with a company that does this type of modern marketing. Their name is Kahuna. I don’t say this as a sales pitch because I am not an employee of theirs, I work with them on influencer marketing. I say this because I know they are on the right track when it comes to the future of marketing. Data is going to win. Data holds the future wins. Big data, small data, smart data, hakuna my data. The key is, are you going to be onboard before your competition or after.
The future of marketing is driven by data, personalization, AI, and timing. If you knew when your consumers were most likely to buy your product, what the right triggers were for them to make a decision, you could time it and be int he right place, with the right messaging, for the right person and bam you have a sale. Or you can always keep spending time and money creating things that seemed perfect and never even got saw by your prospects. Marketing is so complex but is being treated as if it was still simple.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this post, let me know if you had any aha moments or liked what was said as well as your own thoughts on the subject and what you think is causing this increased push into a decreasing market of attention. Thanks for reading.
