Moore’s Law, which states that computer processing speed doubles every two years, has evolved into a technological arms race where technology as a whole is doubling every two years. The untethered existence of even just 30 years ago is difficult to fathom now. People today carry with them, in their pocket, what would have been considered a supercomputer back then.
Along with the size and speed of computers the internet evolved from a space to share ideas into an entity that is as big as the human race. Something that only a handful of people had heard of 30 years ago would literally catapult the first world back to the dark ages if it were to suddenly disappear tomorrow.
As quickly as technology has advanced over the years, human behavior has shifted along with it. As technology that was once unimaginable is now our most depended upon resource. People have the ability to communicate and gain information anytime, anywhere. We’ve lapped the Industrial Age in terms of progress, exponentially. With the ability to gain information instantly marketers have also gained the ability to reach people everywhere they go, at all times of day.
In this world of instant gratification we’ve grown into people with a whole new set of expectations. If we don’t get something now, then it’s not good enough. Gone are the days of a surprise package showing up a week after you ordered something, now people know exactly when their order is packaged, shipped, where it is along the way and the minute it’s supposed to be placed on the front porch. “Please allow 6-8 weeks for delivery” is just as antiquated as the computer that once filled our desktop. The Information Age that we currently reside in has also brought a sub age along with it; The Age of the Customer.
So how do we compete for time and attention as we try to do business in these times? To really understand what we should do to compete, we need to understand more about the factors that have led to such behavior.
Four Factors That Contribute to Shifting Behavior
1st Factor – People Spend a Lot of Time Online
It seems that everyone is online, all the time. No matter where we go there’s technology and access, and we’re taking full advantage of it. The reason for so much connectivity is that people clearly enjoy being connected. All of us want to be connected with our friends, family, work, and interests as much as possible. It makes sense, and our intent is even noble.
If we’re online all the time, it’s good for businesspeople to understand how that time is spent. Let’s take a look at where we spent our online day in 2014, (Courtesy of Statista):
- Social Media: 37 minutes
- Email: 29 minutes
- Online Video: 23 minutes
- Search Engines: 23 minutes
- Online Games: 19 minutes
- Blogs: 8 minutes
- Online Radio: 8 minutes
- Online Newspapers: 5 minutes
- Online Magazines: 3 minutes
- Other: 31 minutes
As you can see, there’s a diversity of activity and interest reflected in these numbers. We can infer that various demographic groups spend differing amounts of time on different types of media: a teenager has different demands than a professional or a retiree. In short, there are different seasons of life that change our consumption allocation.
A prima facie conclusion would be to attribute the spike in overall online behavior to the youth movement. There are thousands of articles published about the Millennial generation and their addiction to technology. However, data suggest that youth engagement in technology is not the only explanation for this rise in online engagement. There’s mounting evidence that growing time spent online goes well beyond our nation’s youth alone.
30% of the Golden Generation visit YouTube at least monthly – (Courtesy of DMR)
12.4 million people 55 years of age or older joined Facebook in 2014, an 80% increase over 2013 – (Courtesty of International Business Times)
People of all generations are jumping at the chance to be online. It turns out we all want to be connected with friends, information, and entertainment.
2nd Factor – People Are Increasingly Mobile
You can’t look around a restaurant, park, or baseball game without seeing people glued to their phones. People take their access with them everywhere they go, and they use their mobile devices to access information. As we look at the number, it becomes clear that the mobility of our access is a big contributor to why we’re online more.
42% of US adults own a tablet computer – (Courtesy of Pew Research Center)
The average American spends almost 2 hours per day on a mobile device – (Courtesy of Search Engine Land)
50% of YouTube views come from mobile devices – (Courtesy of DMR)
More and more people have mobile devices and they’re clearly using them often. It’s difficult to have even a five minute conversation with someone without them glancing at their phone.
3rd Factor – People Use Search Engines to Find Everything
Search engines have become widely used reference tools for anyone seeking easy access to a wide scope of information. People are using search engines to find what they’re looking for, often as the entry point for their access and consumption of information.
17.8 billion explicit core searches were conducted in September – (Courtesy of comScore)
5.9 million searches on Google every day – (Courtesy of Rick Bates via Main Broadcast Coalition)
When you wanted to find something in 1985, you went into the kitchen, grabbed a phone book to find the number, and called from a phone with a cord on it. You made an appointment to go check it out the next day on your lunch break. Now you push a button and ask Google to look up your options, surf around until you find what you want, and order/call/email/chat without even putting down your foot rest. Search engines of all shapes and sizes help us find what we’re looking for because, after all, we want instant gratification.
4th Factor – Information Access Has Led to Empowered Consumers
With the ability to access information at any time, from any place, the game has changed for businesses trying to compete for consumers looking to buy. Gone are the days of potential buyer’s heavy reliance on sales people. “Shopping” for cars is done online, not at the dealership.
The amount of new technical information is doubling every two years and 95% of all of the data in the world has been created in the last two years! – (Courtesy of Rick Bates via Main Broadcast Coalition)
That’s a lot of new information; good thing we’re always connected right? Because this new information is readily available to all of us, and we have options we didn’t have before. That information, when accessed, empowers us to make better buying decisions. We no longer need to wait around to be sold something. We can figure it out ourselves. What this really means for businesses is that our role as business people in the selling process has shifted too, whether we realize it or not. Instead of showing up at our doors asking for help, our customers are helping themselves before we even know they’re interested.
89% of US internet users search online before they make a purchase, even when that purchase is made at a local business – (Courtesy of HubSpot)
Just because we don’t sell an actual product online doesn’t mean the digital landscape isn’t critical to our success. People research what they buy online, even when they don’t buy online. Because of the high availability of detailed online information, consumers that are passionate about the products they purchase are often more educated than the sales person. Digital marketing has become increasingly important as companies must compete for people’s attention in an online, mobile world.
7 Ways to Compete in Today’s Digital Landscape
As the realization has likely set in that you’re behind the curve in positioning your business to compete in this dynamic environment, some application tips could prove helpful. If you’d like to perform your own assessment of your online marketing baseline, I’ve outlined seven important tactics to employ.
- Build a responsive website. We can’t compete in this brave new world without people having the ability to browse our sites from their phones and tablets. The user interfaces (UI) we create should take into account the complete user experiences (UX) that our customers desire. As Seth Godin said in ‘The Big Red Fez’, web visitors are kind of like monkeys in front of a computer. They’re all just looking for the damn banana they got online to find. As businesspeople, it’s our job to make it as easy and painless as possible for our customers to find the banana. If our websites don’t present good user experiences to help people find the banana, we’re failing them.
- Start your own blog. Publishing helpful articles to our websites through our blogs is essential because it provides valuable content for consumers to discover while online. Search engines love fresh content that helps build value to their results pages (SERP), and they reward the websites that produce it with better rankings. The articles can then be shared across a host of online media like social, email, etc. The more content we produce, the more we’ll be seen as our trusted consumers return for help.
- Build a social community. Building our presence across a host of applicable social channels like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and LinkedIn allows us to reach an audience that likely won’t otherwise end up on our websites. Remember, social media (and their apps) make up a large percentage of people’s time online. Since our customers are on social media, we need to be there too. We should be mindful not to be overly promotional, though, instead working to answer questions, share tips to help people learn about what they’re interested in, and provide a sounding board to interested customers.
- Publish resources of value. If consumers are taking the time to educate themselves online before they make a purchase, we should help them, not fight them. Instead of holding all of our ‘secret industry recipes’ close to the vest, we should share our intellectual property openly. If we share our advice and wisdom in a variety of digital formats such as eBooks, Slideshares, Webinars, Whitepapers, and Podcasts, we’ll build a library of value for people to access on demand. This library should live on our website where we can request contact information so we can learn more about the people who are interested in our products and personalize our future conversations.
- Build a sound email marketing strategy. Email isn’t dead: the second highest allotment of time people spend online is checking email databases. If we want to be successful with email, we need to change our mindsets; No one likes spam. Our emails need to be highly relevant. They should be personalized, catered to what we know our customers are interested in, and full of value if we want them to be more effective. Email isn’t a way to blast people with coupons any more than social media is. It’s another channel to stay in touch, inform, and offer consumers help in finding what they’re looking for.
- Track everything and make adjustments. In the world of digital marketing, everything is an experiment. Every piece of strategy we execute is really just a hypothesis. We think it’s going to work or we wouldn’t do it, but we’re not sure until we see the results. If we don’t learn from our digital marketing experiments, we’re unlikely to improve. Careful analysis and a critical approach to reviewing everything we develop for our prospects and customers will help us build on our successes and learn from our failures.
- Don’t be afraid to put yourself out there. There are really two schools of thought on how we can compete. One option is to be guarded and minimize risk. Another is to be open and take chances. We can accept the possibility of failure and proceed with cautious optimism, or we can come up with enough ways things might fail to justify inaction. My advice is to go for it. Put yourself out there and take a chance.
Yes, someone might not like the way you write. You might get negative feedback about your brand or product on social media. You can bet that everything you do won’t be a home run, but striking out once in a while is acceptable too. You’ll never hit the home run you’re dreaming of if you don’t swing the bat. Work hard to learn the best practices, plan carefully, execute with precision, test everything, and repeat often. You’ll get better and better as you learn and experiment, and so will your results.