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If you are a marketer, you must have heard this before: “We are cutting your budget, and where are our leads?”
Sounds a bit conflicting, right?
The digital era turned marketing into a captivating adventure and a formidable challenge. But what is this paradox of contemporary marketing? And can we solve it?
The Digital Delight and Battlefield for Attention
Thanks to the digital realm, marketers have reached the hearts of their customers with tailored messaging and precise targeting. It was a marketing utopia – budgets spent smartly, ads placed right under the consumer’s nose, where both brands and customers were happy to find a perfect match.
But alas, where’s a great opportunity, there’s great competition. As quickly as content boomed, customers found themselves overwhelmed with a sea of ads. The result? A noisy marketing battlefield where even the most charming campaigns struggle to stand out. This led to an unexpected head-to-head where brands churned out floods of content to outshout their competitors, leaving customers feeling more adrift than ever.
The Budget Cuts and the Rising Costs
If the overflow of content wasn’t enough problem for marketers to think about, soon came economic hardships, which made companies look for options to trim their budgets. Marketers seemed like an easy scapegoat.
The Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2021-2022 showcase a rollercoaster of marketing budget trends. After the optimistic predictions of 2020, reality hit hard – marketing budgets plummeted from 11% of company revenue in 2020 to a mere 6.4% in 2021. Marketing, it seems, got its fair share of belt-tightening.
“If your brand is not on Google, does your brand even exist?” – became incredibly accurate during the pandemic when the only means of finding businesses was through online search. As the number of brands using Google Ads grew, so did the price to stay in the game. Digital advertising expenses skyrocketed. More budget was needed to capture the same number of leads.
The most recent industry report shows that Google Ads’ cost per lead has been increasing by around 20% yearly. At the same time, conversion rates stumbled, with a notable decline of 14% across all industries. No wonder Google reported the slowest annual advertising revenue growth in a decade, merely 7%. Many marketers can no longer afford the luxury of Google Ads.
