– Many software tools lack substantive guidance and only provide summaries, leading to hidden business issues.
– Advertising costs will continue to rise, requiring brands to reinvent themselves and embrace community.
– The gap in strategy on the agency side is significant, with ineffective advice from popular influencers and over-templated email marketing.Seek out the best talent and pay for it, without cutting corners, particularly in the area of strategy.Over the past year, I’ve gotten to know a lot of people, talked to a lot of people, and developed relationships with a lot of people. My last call of 2021 was with Christian Hoppe, and our 30 minutes turned into an hour and a half. Here are the takeaways from some of what we discussed:
1. People are approaching software incorrectly. Too much of it just provides summaries without substantive guidance on what to do. They can’t provide the guidance because they don’t know how to, and marketing changes every few months in terms of strategy. Dashboards for the sake of dashboards tend to hide the underlying business issues.
2. Costs are going to keep going up, and advertising will continue to suck tons of money away from brands. Most brands will need to reinvent themselves and embrace community because, unfortunately, they didn’t start with one in the beginning.
3. The gap in strategy on the agency side is massive. Those with the most followers tend to give the most useless advice. Those that post with intelligent things usually can’t really be related to or understood by the masses. Email has become so templatized that it’s the quickest to see decreasing returns due to over templatization brought on by agency models.
4. There’s a play for marketing arbitrage, where a few people get together and take large percentages to just run companies in e-commerce more effectively on the biggest spend portion, marketing. 2022 will be ripe for this. They won’t be traditional agencies.
5. Simplicity in business models based on scalable unit economics. In other words, not all brands should be worth tens of millions of dollars. A lot of brands should seek to just build a great product, have healthy profit margins, and build a brand they are proud of that provides them enough money to work with people they like and live a happy life.
6. Data and knowing what to do with it is the great divide. It will continue to widen as more people struggle to do what’s necessary to learn how to leverage it properly.
7. SMS and email are one-to-one. Society is shifting, though, to collaborative. A lot of brands will not be able to make this shift. Smart solutions will develop around this. Read 🦄🛠Zyan WC’s posts about Discord that I’ve been sharing.
8. Unit economics is missing from most founders’ knowledge. It’s pretty non-existent across most agencies as well.https://www.linkedin.com/in/jivanco