Cutting the cable and how social marketing is more crucial than ever

Last year, New York Times reported that Comcast had more internet subscribers than cable. Two weeks ago, I became one of those customers. For the last four years, I’ve been rocking the cable subscription, but as time has gone on, I’ve found myself watching less and less TV. There’s the usual reasons: I stream most of the programs I watch, my cable bill dramatically increased in price (it went up 100 percent, no joke), and I saw networks drop off the package I subscribed to, meaning I was paying more for less. Not really a great deal. So I switched to strictly internet and decreased by monthly bill 55 percent. Yay me!

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been pitching a few different social campaigns and one of the questions that comes up from old school marketers is that why should we tip the scales of a marketing budget from broadcast media (radio, TV) to digital media.

The NYT post referenced above reports that cable companies subscribers had 60 percent internet users compared to their 17 percent video-only subscribers. That’s a really big difference.

Before I continue, I’m going to address the fact that organic reach on Facebook and Twitter is all but non-existent at this point. The pay-to-play model has become more prevalent as we’ve continued, but that’s simply a sign of the times. Think about how much it costs for radio, TV spots, and bus ads. You could still have a relatively decent impact for a reasonable cost*.

More and more people are abandoning traditional cable altogether and, as is such, it’s important to change along with that. No one is suggesting that you completely rewrite your marketing strategy, but giving social and digital a bigger place won’t hurt.

To wit, most of the people who attend my band’s shows find out about them on social media. It’s an even playing field because there’s no way we could compete with a marketing budget on a Beyonce level.

Going beyond Facebook, it’s important to look at streaming services as a part of the digital marketing strategy. One of the reasons I use Squarespace to build and host my site is not because of a recommendation from a friend, it’s because I heard an ad on Colt Cabana’s ART OF WRESTLING podcast, checked it out and became quite happy with the end result. Get creative! This is a great time for content marketing and we’re no longer shackled to traditional media — it’s indeed a brave (semi) new world out there.

*This is predicated on what KPIs you’re measuring and not all campaigns will have the same measurable analytics.