Which marketing channel is the best to focus on today?
On this episode, Russell talks about how TV changed over the years and made advertising more difficult. He also explains how social media is changing in much the same way as TV.
Here are 4 interesting things you will learn about in today’s episode:
So listen below to see how you can use social media to advertise to your specific market.
---Transcript---
Good morning all my fellow Marketing In Your Car friends. Welcome to another amazing day. Hey everybody, it’s amazing today. It’s like 80 degrees, which it shouldn’t be. I think it said on the news that normally it’s like 60 today, but it’s not, it’s 80. It’s beautiful and it’s amazing and I love it. You know you can’t help but be happy when it’s nice out here.
Okay, last night I had wrestling practice. I have not wrestled for a couple of weeks. We beat the crap out of each other and today my face is feeling it, my neck is feeling it, my back is feeling it, my arms, my sides, my ribs, my fingers. I am jacked and I love it. I miss this feeling. This is so much better than running on a treadmill. It was awesome. So last nice after practice we were talking about some stuff and I mentioned something that I thought was kind of cool so I wanted to share with you guys.
So I wanted to talk about old media, kind of what happened and then new media and what is happening now, because it’s really interesting. Rewind back I don’t know, twenty years ago maybe. No, I guess, dang I’m getting old. I guess twenty wasn’t that long ago, maybe thirty years ago. Whenever TV was different, before cable. There used to be three channels, there was ABC, CBS, and NBC I believe and maybe Fox, I don’t know when Fox came around, but initially it was three channels.
So if you wanted to get to everybody in the world, there’s only one of three spots you could advertise on. And those who capitalized on it made a lot of money really fast. In fact, the first time I meant Tony Robbins, this is the kind of story he told me. He said, “When I got started thirty years ago there were only three channels, so we just targeted those three channels, it was easy and we made a ton of money. What happened is that a few years later, they started adding more channels”. Maybe that’s when Fox News came about, and PBS and I don’t know, some of the other ones. And then it turned into cable. Cable had a couple of channels and then it turned into a couple more, and then today there’s hundreds channels on cable. Still there’s never actually anything good on TV, which is kind of amazing.
But there’s hundreds and hundreds of channels. And Tony said that his business during the recession took a huge hit and it was mostly because it was harder to get distribution directly to people. It became more expensive, it became harder, it became more spread out because no longer are people watching three channels, they are watching 103, and to buy ads on 103 different networks became really expensive. So because of that they were struggling they started exploring different avenues and that’s how we kind of met him, a bunch of us internet marketing dudes. We initially met him during that part of the journey where he was like, “Man, our distribution channels are so segmented and so fragmented now we can effectively get to our end audience.” And it changed the whole dynamic of their business. They had to shift and evolve and get better.
That was this whole process of going from 1 or 2 centralized spots where everybody’s eyeballs are at, to hundreds of spots and how it changed the business world. Now I was talking about how similar that is today. And one cool thing that’s interesting, the one thing that got easier when channels split is that because all these channels start popping up, things became very niche specific. There’s the camping channel, there’s the home channel, you know HGTV where they’re building homes and fixing and rehabbing and stuff. There’s all these different channels and they’re very niche-y. So if you had a niche business related to one of those channels it became easier, because you’re like, “I don’t have to advertise on NBC in front of a billion people and hope that a few people that actually care about my camping product are going to see it.” Now you can go to just the camping channel and everyone who is interested in camping is on that one channel. So for niche markets it became a lot easier, because now you’ve got your captive audience all in one spot and you can focus and target on that one channel. So that was kind of the big benefit that came from this huge breakup of TV.
Man the sun is so bright, my body wants to sneeze like crazy. So if I start sneezing, having a sneezing attack, that’s why.
Alright, so that’s the offline world. What happened, things were harder for people and also things were easier. When I looked at online it was kind of similar. A few years ago Mark Zuckerberg had a really sweet idea for a thing called Facebook, built it out, first it was free for a long time, then he started adding ad platforms. At first it became the place. It was the only place you would go, you could jump on Facebook, buy some ads and become rich. It was that easy because everybody was in one centralized spot. Just like back in the day with ABC, NBC and CBS, one spot, so Facebook was easy. It just worked. Then what happened is that after Facebook, a few years later, all the sudden people started splitting attention, because now these other social networks started popping up. You get Twitter, you get Pinterest, you start getting all the video platforms, you get Periscope and other things like that and then you split again. You’ve got Snapchat, you’ve got I can’t think of them all, but it went from one spot where people were spending their time and energy now it’s this huge fragmented thing.
Now people are picking their favorite platform and they’re leaving Facebook. Not everybody’s eyeballs are on Facebook 80 hours a day like it used to be. Now it’s like, “I spend my time on Snapchat, that’s where you gotta find me.” And then other people, “I’m on Pinterest.” And other people are on different spots. So what’s happened is that us as marketers used to be like “Let’s get really good at Facebook ads.” Now you gotta get good at Facebook and Pinterest and Snapchat and Twitter and YouTube and….where everybody’s eyeballs are going.
So there’s kind of positives and negatives of that. Very similar to the positives and negatives of the TV world. But before I explain those things, I am at my little man’s parent-teacher conference. I’m pulling in the parking lot, so what I’m going to do, I’m going to pause this right now, I’m going to go find out how smart my little son is, get his report cards and then I will be back for the rest of my drive back to the office to discuss this in a little more details. I’ll be back in a little bit guys. Talk to you soon.
Alright everybody, I am back. In case you are wondering, Aiden passed his kindergarten, or I guess his preschool parent-teacher conferences. He’s a genius, he cuts straight lines, he draws great pictures, he can count to ten all by himself. He’s amazing. Its fun they have pictures from when the year started and then now and you can kind of see the difference of how far he’s progressed on the Alphabet, numbers, pictures, coloring, cutting, drawing pictures of himself. Anyway, it was awesome. So there you go, my son’s a genius, which is cool.
So where did we leave off? I think I left off talking about how online media is starting to be fragmented just like the offline world was, it was happened way faster by the way. We had three channels on TV for decades. You know Facebook had a year, two year run before Twitter and these others start popping up everywhere and splitting the attention. So the attention’s going to all other sorts of places. So with that comes a couple of things. First off it gets harder. How is someone like me or you, who’s like, we’re small entrepreneurs, we’ve got a little team and we are trying to effectively market on thirty different platforms. It’s hard. At least with the TV age it was like, it’s thirty platforms, but basically you call your ad guy and say, “Hey run my ad over here, over here, and over here.” But with what we got to do, every platform is different. Some are keyword focused some are interest focused, some are….the way you run the ad, the way you design the ad are all different. You can’t run the same commercial on thirty channels. You gotta write image ads for here, video ads for here, 15 second videos here, but longer videos over here.
And then each platform has multiple ways to advertise too. You’ve got pre-roll videos, post-roll, tech….it’s hard. It’s this huge segmentation splitting of attention and for us to effectively be in all of them, it’s almost impossible. What do you do? It’s a good question. What should you do? A couple of things that I would notice, first off is notice the fact about in the TV world that it got easier when you focused more on a niche. If you were selling camping gear, you could go to the camping channel. You’re target demographic was there, which is cool. So it’s easier. So same thing as here, you gotta realize that even though there’s thirty different platforms, your audience isn’t on all of them. Even if they are on all of them, doesn’t mean you have to be on all of them.
I always tell people, you gotta learn initially one platform that you know your audience is on and become a master of that. So if I know camping channel is where everyone is at, that’s where I’m going to focus, if I know for me all my people are on Pinterest, I’m going to focus there and master that one thing. If I know they’re all on Instagram, or if I know they’re all on Snapchat….Wherever your people are, that’s the platform to pick. Just like the camping channel, we’re going to pick that one and be the best at that and focus on that and start pulling out customers from there. And really become good at that and then after you’ve mastered it, not while you’re mastering, this is the key. After you’ve mastered it, then go and pick the next channel. And then you can add on another one and another, but you shouldn’t be in thirty different things. It’s just too hard. You’re watering down all of your efforts, whereas you can focus on one and perfect it, it becomes better.
So those are some of my observations and thoughts today that I thought were kind of interesting and I hope that helps you guys to kind of look at that and say , “Okay, this is being fragmented, I understand that now and I can’t be everywhere at once because I will run out of money and time and energy and my message will become so diluted. I gotta pick one.” Pick the one that your market’s at because everyone’s market is different. My market’s not on Pinterest, but I’ve got other friends that make tons of money on Pinterest. My market is maybe on Instagram, I don’t know, I haven’t figured Instagram out yet. But other markets I got friends making a million bucks a year a hundred percent off Instagram. So you gotta figure out where your people are actually at? How are they consuming content? And you got to be there. But you don’t have to be on every single platform. That’s the mistake that so many people are making. And they’re spending money on so many different things. You can mine a lot of gold out of one well.
So figure out where that’s at and dig deeper and deeper and just kind of focus there and eventually, especially depending on the platform, some platforms are smaller. Some TV channels don’t have as much viewership, so eventually you’re going to tap out where everyone’s seen your message and you’re going to get ad fatigue and it’s just not going to do as well. At that point do you change the message or that’s when you add a second channel or a second distribution channel to focus on? But that’s a more powerful strategy, go deep and try to mine all that gold out of that channel as opposed to trying to effectively be in thirty or forty or fifty different channels and hopefully dabble in all of them. I’d always rather go deep in one section than dabble in a lot.
So that’s it for today you guys. I’m heading into the office. I got some exciting things happening. So exciting. I’m sure I’ll be sharing those with you guys in the next little while. I just wanted to take the time to drop some of those thoughts with you guys. So that’s what I got. Have an amazing day and I’ll talk to you all again soon.