661-441-2429

How to Deal with Marketing Saturation

Marketing Strategy

help sign

By John Eberhard

In a recent video I covered how saturation of various media or platforms has become a major problem for marketers in the US. In other words, in many cases there are too many of your type of business on Google, Facebook, Yelp, or other platforms. Or marketers in general are using a platform, such as email, or cold calling by phone, too much.

The results are:

  1. Potential prospects are tuning out any marketing message on a certain platform, such as email or phone.
  2. It becomes harder to differentiate your business from others, because there are so many advertisers there.

What Can You Do?

What does this mean for marketers today? It means that with media that have high “rejection rates,” you cannot rely heavily on those media for your marketing efforts. If you do, you will go through lots of motions for little effect.

Many companies rely mostly on email for their marketing efforts today. It’s tempting. It’s free, and fast. But you have to think with the fact that at least 70% of the people on your email lists are never going to see your message.

So what does a marketer need to do today?

  1. First of all you need to realize that this is a massive change from 20, 30, or 40 years ago. There is more advertising going out to people today than at any time in history.
  2. Secondly you have to look for media where your target public is OK with receiving promotional communications, or where they will at least see it.
  3. You have to find media that is NOT highly saturated. For example, if you search on Google for your type of business and find 20 to 30 or more competitors in your suburban city, Google is too saturated for your type of business in your town. You can spend time and money on search engine optimization, or you can spend money on Google ads, but it’s going to be an uphill climb in either case. But if Google is not highly saturated for your type of business, you can likely do quite well with Google Search and Display ads.
  4. Google has Google Display ads where the cost per click tends to be much less than with Google Search. This is where you create ads with pictures and text and they are placed on sites that have given Google permission to run ads there.
  5. Google also allows you to take a video and run it as what is called a “pre-roll” ad, which is where your video will appear before the one the viewer is going to. So if you have a relatively short video, which has a call to action at the end, you can run it as a pre-roll. And the cost per view is as low as 1 cents each.
  6. You can try the same thing on Bing.com and see how many of your competitors are advertising there. Bing has a lot less traffic than Google but if there are fewer competitors you might be better able to stand out there.
  7. One thing almost every type of business should be doing is building up their “in-house” email list, meaning a list of clients and prospects, people who have been in contact with your company or inquired about your products or services. By the very nature of that type of email list, those people will be more willing to read or listen to your message. You can take a version of that list that has phone numbers on it and test sending bulk-texts to them.
  8. Another thing I have done in recent years is go back to inexpensive, large direct mail postcards (like 6 x 9”). In this case you at least know that most of your prospects will at least see it and you have a chance to grab their attention.
  9. If you are in the home improvement business, there are sites such as Anji.com, Houzz.com, Homeadvisor.com and others which you can try. There are sites where the public goes to find a home improvement contractor. There are similar sites in the legal fields, the music field, and others.
  10. Try Facebook advertising. This tends to be more effective for business to consumer businesses, then for business to business. But either way it is worth a shot. Your clickthroughs tend to be less expensive than for Google Search.
  11. With a Facebook company page, you can run ads that get people to “like” your page. Then a certain number of those people will see what you post on the page. You can run these ads for $100 per month and build up your number of likes over time, to over 1,000 or 2,000.
  12. SEO (search engine optimization) can work for you even if your market is highly saturated online, by finding keywords that have decent search traffic but low competition. But you have to do comprehensive SEO (see my video on this) and be willing to commit to it long-term.
  13. All this does not mean that you shouldn’t do email marketing. But it does mean that you shouldn’t do JUST email marketing.

If you’d like help mapping out a strategy of which promotional media to use, that are not overly saturated, contact Real Web Marketing at 818-472-6725, or fill out a form here.