Yes, yes and yes. Now let's dive deeper.
Historic Shift Against Traditional Marketing
In 2018, digital marketing spend tipped over the 50% mark, for the first time in history of marketing traditional marketing received lower ad spend than digital marketing spend. This contributes to the long-lasting debate of traditional over digital marketing spend. While the shift has been clear ever since, it was not widely accepted.
Forward Into the Future
The Pandemic propelled businesses to 10 years ahead. It has forced digital adoption on businesses whose priority had not been a digital transformation and presence. It shifted things from the way meetings are done and projects are managed to how sales are made. Outside the operations of a company it has also shifted a vast amount of marketing budget to digital channels. With more than half the world seeing off and on lockdown for prolonged periods traditional marketing did little to convert into sales with the public locked at home.
More Room for Digital Spend
Businesses and organisations cancelled events, cancelled promotional campaigns in stores and put a hold on all spend on physical marketing from leaflets to billboards. This gave rise to the only channel that not only remained healthy during the chaos, but rose in traffic significantly! The world stuck at home, started to consume ever more social media, movies, TV, books and online learning from Youtube to courses.
Does high digital marketing spend mean guaranteed success? No.
Start-ups and other businesses that already had a healthy presence online shifted focus on digital marketing spend, but others took months to catch up and some are still oblivious to the importance of it. It is not the fault of start-up founders entirely, some are faced with sudden drops of sales, others struggle to sign up new people to their service and others are approached by marketing agencies charging tens of thousands for their services.
Start-ups need a unique set of tools and services to accelerate initial growth which can be done for relatively cheap but only can increase advertising spend when the business is digital-ready. This lack of time and direction has made more founders struggle than healthy for an industry that is famous for 90% failure within 5 years of operating!
