Time to Get Noticed!

Had you noticed? That is the whole problem, isn’t it? You don’t notice. And if you don’t notice, then your audience certainly is not going to notice. Businesses are increasingly becoming trapped between a rock and a hard place. On traditional channels, audience is shrinking and no one notices, especially to those running the enterprise.

Want to get noticed on digital channels? There exists immense competition from… well, just about everywhere on the internet. Consider this: the amount of content produced in just one second is more than a single person could ever attempt to consume in an entire lifetime. In case you have not noticed, there’s no shortage of channels and platforms. How does one stand out so that someone or lots of someones notice?

You remember “advertising. ” It carries something of a bad rap among audiences on digital, judging by the recent uptick in ad blocking. And people PAY to have the ads blocked. The economic cost of ad blockers reached $21.8 billion in 2015 and the most common trigger for ad blocking is simply the realization that ad blockers exist. Well, actually it is the fact that the ads are so overwhelming and annoying one thinks the internet services are holding your service hostage behind the ads until you pay up to have it all eliminated.

There is a straightforward answer to captivating and holding an audience. Yes even the ones that continually flee to newer media. Yes, even the ones who are more easily distracted by a deluge of content. And yes, even the ones who actively try to block your communications.
The answer is being more creative. That has always been the answer.

Indeed, about two-thirds (64%) of all digital marketers said they have devoted more resources to creative production to improve ad quality.

Content Creation is the buzz word and everyone is beating the bushes for quality writers. So much copy today is stolen directly and blatant pasted in, badly written and simply a loud ad pretending its original, or they recycle the same material over and over. Yes, there is really good content out there. When you find it, you know it and actively engage it.

But as we position ourselves in the mid-year and rise to meet the challenge of grabbing audience attention and building mental availability, there’s a large risk that we don’t use our content creation budget wisely.

An entire 40% of the average advertising bucket is tied up in production costs, according to Ad Age.

But that 40% is projected to grow quickly — almost two-thirds of marketers said they saw growth in the share of media expenses that are non-working last year. Non-working spend is the amount departments spend on the production of content, as opposed to its distribution to audiences.

The majority expect it to grow even more; in fact, just 17% think they’ll see a decrease in those non-working costs in 2016.

Unfortunately, those expenses aren’t actually growing to improve the quality of content. Rather, they’re being driven largely by process inefficiencies.

As we said, issues like process and briefing are avoidable — not reasons for accepting higher production costs.

There’s little indication that any of us in the industry as a whole have a handle on these costs; the channels for which non-working spend has grown the fastest in 2015 will continue to grow the fastest this year.

And the growth of content creation expenses gets worse as your marketing budget scales:

This is likely because if you have a larger budget, you’re trying to reach out to audiences in more regions; you have more products and more brands to manage; you’re working with more people; and you have more process steps slowing you down. It’s easy for inefficiency to happen when you’re working with a department of that scale.

Totally and absolutely confused by all of this? Contact us today at BSG. We have superb content creation as well as all the tools to make your site formidable.