In a lot of ways, modern marketing is broken.
Speaking at this year's Digital Marketing Summit in London, Wayne Lloyd of the EOS Nation opened his presentation by outlining why the systems of marketing we use are fast become outdated.
"Middle-men are trusted in marketing to do such things as bringing buyers to real sellers," Lloyd explained. "But the reality is far less comforting".
The reality is, marketing today is infected with a myriad of issues. Email is the most effective way to reach potential customers, a far more effective approach than the distant second, social media. According to the lead generator tech company OptinMonster, 77% of people prefer to receive permission-based promotional messages via Email, in comparison to the just 4% of individuals who prefer to receive them through Facebook and the 1% who would rather they reached them through Twitter.
"email marketing is more effective than social media across the board, with just one exception – sharing," OptinMonster claims.
However, the effectiveness of email has also led to its abuse. In 2017, UK airline Flybe was fined £70,000 ($92,178) for sending out more than 3.3 million unconsented emails in August 2016 alone. Instances like Flybe's contributed to the introduction of the EU's GDPR regulations which not only made the penalties for such abuses much harsher, but made consent to email marketing a much more proactive choice.
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Another mammoth issue with email marketing today is data security. The more email addresses and other personal information you have stored, the greater your risk of liability if (and when) your system is hacked. The constant threat of data breaches has worsened significantly year-on-year with practically every tech giant from Facebook to Amazon having been hacked at some point or another. According to a report by Carbon Black, 92% of businesses in the UK have been breached at one point, with most having been breached between three to five times.
This means no enterprise is too large or small to be safe from attack as no centralized system is immune from hacking, they can only be made marginally harder to breach.
The next most popular avenue to customers for marketers is social media and the rising trend over the last couple of years has seen companies investing heavily in influencer marketing. According to Influencer Marketing Hub, Google searches for "influencer marketing" have increased by 325% in the last 12 months alone. In a survey of marketing managers, influencer marketing was the fastest growing online customer-acquisition method (28%), beating out organic searches (15%) and email (13%).
However, influencer marketing brings with it a huge challenge for marketers: The scourge of fake accounts.
Earlier this year, Social Chain research revealed that a startling 25% of influencers today have paid for followers from illegal bot farms. This is having a drastic impact on the industry. According Wayne Lloyd, this is one of the key factors leading to brands collectively wasting more than $19bn (around $51m every day) advertising to fake online entities. Accounts belonging to spambots, likebots, chatbots and similar applications make up more than three billion accounts across all social media platforms, according Statista. Researchers at the University of Southern California estimated that 15% of Twitter's 400 million monthly users are bots, but added that this estimation was "conservative".
*Percentage of their followers which are bots. Courtesy Wayne LloydÂ
Businesses are being forced to think up more and more elaborate solutions to combat this waste. In regard to influencer marketing strategies, many companies have started requiring their influencers prove that the majority of their followers are real people.
