🌊 We’re All Riding the Marketing Wave
We’ve covered this in a previous article entitled ‘What’s the Deal With B2B Brands Becoming Media Companies?’ However, in a time with ever-changing social media algorithms; Elon Musk proving he doesn’t understand how branding works with his changing the name of ‘Twitter’ to ‘X’; and an A.I. takeover that for some reason everybody is fine with… we would like to expand on our points.
All of us B2B marketers are constantly riding the marketing wave; we’re all trying to stay ahead of trends and figure out what makes audiences tick. This shouldn’t be too hard for us, right? After all, a marketer’s job is to truly understand how people think and hone in on it. Sure, you need to be able to understand metrics and data and SEO and analytics and… other stuff (yawn). But really, we want to understand how people think and make their lives better in one way or another.
Keeping track of your audience can often feel like chasing a dragon, unable to fully catch up… but have you ever wondered why that is? Audiences aren’t dragons, they’re people like you and me; it shouldn’t be such an arduous task to keep track of who they are and what they want – they’re your audience, for crying out loud!
Perhaps, then, it’s something to do with the fact that our audience isn’t ours; the data we need in order to do a good job is hiding behind lock and key, and we can see it, but we can never actually own it.
📼 Renting? This Isn’t Blockbuster!
I suppose in today’s world where struggling to pay rent to greedy landowners and governments is the norm for most people, or where owning a physical copy of a new film on DVD or something is standard, it shouldn’t come as a shock to us that our audiences aren’t really ours. If you were to go onto Netflix, you would have a myriad of TV shows and movies at your disposal to watch, but none of them are yours. You’re streaming them through a service: that’s all you’re doing with your audience.
Anthony Kennada of AudiencePlus also believes that we are renting our audience, which is the entire reason AudiencePlus was set up in the first place. In a video from last month, he says: ‘It’s been a tough week for digital marketers, especially folks who are renting access to their audience through LinkedIn and other social channels, as well as folks who are paying through their audience through Google Adwords and other advertising networks.”
He goes on to say: “On the rented side, LinkedIn introduced some new algorithm changes that have severely limited the reach of both brands and individuals who are trying to communicate and distribute content to their audience.”
It’s tough, and so long as we’re renting our audience, we’ll never see the true extent of the metrics and data, we’ll never have real agency over it. I’d go as far to say that we’re not even renting them, for that implies there is a definitive date we have to give them back.
No, I would argue that we are instead streaming them. There is no real end in site, there’s no definitive return date, but one day the LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok and Google servers – you know, the ones with all of our data on them – could one day be wiped from existence. The same goes for Netflix and Amazon, you could one day lose all five seasons of Better Call Saul, and then what would you do?
If we could own our data and had full control over our own servers, then we’d be able to make sure everything was kept in check; we could hold ourselves accountable for things that went wrong; we could see literally everything we needed to; we could communicate with them… without having to spend a dime.
It’s why email marketing is so great, click one button… communicate directly with many.
Kind of like we’ve doing right now.
…
God, I miss Blockbuster.
Sam Hollis is a Writer for Fame, SaaS Marketer, as well as his own fictional short stories. He lives and works in Birmingham with his three cats and his dog (way too many pets, if you ask us)