Even Advertisers Say Ads Don’t Work

by | Nov 11, 2015

Once again another study reveals that advertising, both online and offline, is being called out as ineffective. Ads don’t work. And I’m not talking about the typical consumer study but one that surveyed marketers themselves.

Some four thousand were polled in this extensive study from Hubspot http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/overrated-marketing-tactics by Lindsay Kolowich (https://twitter.com/lkolo25) and here is what they had to say:

  • 41% feel offline advertising is overrated

That’s right, a whopping percentage of marketing professionals in North America feel offline traditional advertising (aka outbound marketing) is overrated as a marketing tactic. In other words, nearly half of marketers don’t believe in the effectiveness of legacy advertising.

  • 16% feel online advertising is overrated

While not as bad as offline ad scores, there was still a sizable percentage of full time marketers that felt online advertising is not all that great either. Of course this just points to an ongoing trend that standard online advertising is dead http://www.cmo.com/articles/2013/9/18/the_banner_ad_is_dea.html or even worse, harmful, with issues like online ad fraud https://moz.com/blog/online-advertising-fraud.

  • 90%+ are turning to inbound marketing to attract prospects and delight customers. Providing information, value and reasons for people to visit their sites and open their communications. It’s commonly referred to as content marketing.

Wow – here’s something where nearly everyone agrees, inbound marketing is effective and moves the needle for marketers.

So if the marketing professionals think ads don’t work, then what does all of this mean for you, the small business owner or organization leader? It means that moving to inbound marketing, where you attract customers with content, is where you need to focus your marketing efforts.

And therein lies the dilemma for SMB’s. Developing content can be hard, confusing, expensive and time consuming. But there is a natural means for you to find content that is easy to develop, cost little or nothing at all and where you are expert.

How you say? Simply tell your story and voilà, you have the best of the best in inbound content marketing right at your fingertips. Storytelling allows you to connect and engage with customers and prospects in the right way, the authentic way. You simply don’t need to spend a lot of money to tell your story and start getting it seen and shared on social media.

Just get started – whether on your blog or Facebook page or in a quick smartphone video you upload to YouTube. Your story doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be true.

And that’s the difference between advertising and your content. It’s the difference that attracts the customer who is out there, looking for a story like yours to relate to, looking for a company like yours that she can trust and return to time and time again.

And the great thing is that you can start telling it today.

Right. So. Maybe you ought to stop reading and go get busy storytelling.