MARKETING
The #1 Reason Your Marketing Agency Is Failing

Running a marketing agency isn’t easy. It’s not even *slightly* hard. It’s really hard.
The challenges you face will have you questioning why you chose to build an agency in the first place, and if it’s time to throw in the towel. Difficult clients, employees, and deliverables turn the romanticized dream of agency life into a one-way ticket to personal development land.
This is the land that requires you to level up your mindset—or fall flat in your business.
We’re not recommending any books or courses that will change the way you look at your agency (and life). Instead, we want you to take a look at how you’re running your agency…and why that’s keeping you in a perpetual cycle that feels like this:

And this advice comes straight from Ryan Deiss, co-founder and CEO of DigitalMarketer and serial entrepreneur running over a dozen other businesses. At one point, Ryan fired himself as CEO of DigitalMarketer because he thought the problem was him—the company would only survive if he left the captain’s seat.
In a way…that wasn’t entirely wrong. What Ryan discovered after firing himself, hiring a new CEO, having to fire the new CEO, and rehiring himself was that his business wasn’t built the right way.
It was operating on the wrong system.
Every Business Has an Operating System
Your operating system is how your business runs—just like an operating system is how a software program runs. A software program needs a set of algorithms, a common language, and desired outputs. Your agency needs processes and SOPs, communication and alignment, and goals and objectives.
And whether you put them in place or not, they’re there. That’s why your agency is frustrating, complicated, and you’re facing constant decision fatigue. It’s running on the wrong operating system.
There are two situations that tell your agency you need to upgrade your current operating system:
#1: You’re experiencing system overload
Sound the alarms because things are not going well. In system overload, plans are loosely defined and rarely followed (making 90% of your meeting a waste of time and money). Work is pure chaos and nothing important seems to get done except when something is actually on fire. Team members constantly need to be told what to do, nobody seems to know what’s going on and profits are lower even with higher sales.
#2: You have founder burnout
Welcome to the club, it’s nice to have you here! Founder burnout is normal…and solvable. You don’t need to spend your days stressed and feeling trapped in your agency. You can’t be the sole creator of everything that happens inside your business (from hires, to content, to lead generation). That’s the speed train to burnout, and even shutting down a business that’s one step away from being all you’d hoped.
Every business has an operating system and agency owners tend to create a YouOS. In YouOS, YOU are the operating system. The agency operates around you because you’re the center of its universe.
And that means your agency owns you.
Install an OS that Scales Your Agency
Your marketing agency is failing because you accidentally installed YouOS instead of sOS (The Scalable Operating Framework). YouOS requires you to be working in your business from morning to night…or else you don’t move forward. You end up in the perpetual loop of putting out fire after fire and suddenly, it’s the end of the year and you didn’t even come close to reaching your profit goals, working with the clients you hoped, and creating Version 2.0 of your agency.
The Scalable Operating Framework (sOS):
- Documents and optimizes your agency’s deliverable creation process and assigns clear roles and responsibilities reinforcing team accountability
- Communicates progress, pivots, and priority shifts in as close to real-time as possible
- Provides clarity around the company’s vision, mission, values, and goals
That sounds like a refreshing change from YouOS, huh?
Here’s how to shift your agency from the YouOS Framework that’s the #1 reason your marketing agency is failing and towards the Scalable operating system (sOS) Framework.
Step 1: Define Scale For Your Agency
There are 4 growth targets to choose from:
- Hypergrowth: 3x, 3x, 2x, 75% per year (7 years = $100mm company, true disruption, usually VC-funded)
- Rapid growth: 2x, 2x, 75%, 50% (very fast growth, usually difficult to achieve without some kind of outside funding or in very fast-growth markets)
- Steady growth: 50-75% YoY (great growth goal for bootstrapped companies)
- Mature growth: 10-25% (fine as long as margins are strong, just make sure you aren’t lagging behind the market. If the market is flat, 10% growth is fine. If the market is growing at 10%, then you are falling behind)
Ryan suggests figuring out your current top-line revenue and seeing if you can make it your bottom-line revenue in 3 years.
Step 2: Map the Value Engines of Your Agency
The goal of this step is to visually map out how your agency creates its deliverables. There are 3 types of value engines:
- Growth engine (attract and convert new customers)
- Fulfillment engine (deliver the promised value)
- Innovation engine (create, update, and improve offerings)
In Ryan’s words, “Never underestimate the power of simply documenting how value is created in your business.”
Step 3: Create Functional SOPs (Your Employees Actually Use)
You only need to document what’s actually important. If you try to document everything, your employees and freelancers won’t look at them. Figure out what SOPs to create by looking at the value engines of your business. You’ll create two types of documentation as needed:
- Checklists for SOPs
- Audits for areas of your business where people make a decision (they buy your basic package vs. premium package)
Make sure to store your SOPs and audits in an extremely convenient place. You can use fancy software or just use Excel (that’s what DigitalMarketer uses).
Step 4: Assign a Team Member to Every Task
If you don’t assign a team member to tasks…guess who that task will fall on? You’ll be in charge of keeping the accountability to the goals and SOPs and before you know it, you’ve downgraded back to YouOS.
To stay in your upgraded sOS, your agency needs to assign a team member to each value engine, so nothing can slip through the cracks.
You’ll notice some of your employees and freelancers aren’t part of this, and that’s okay. This is your support. They’re the people helping those in charge of each value engine.
Step 5: Create scorecards to stay on track
Every week, you’ll look at your scorecards to make sure everything is on track. Your scorecard is just a fancy spreadsheet that tells you:
- Your North Star metrics
- Products
- Marketing
- Etc.
And for each, you have a team member assigned, a monthly target, and the actual metric you hit. You’ll also add a status column that immediately tells you where that project stands. Is it doing great? Is it falling off a cliff?
Better yet—who’s in charge and what questions do you need to ask them (or do you just need to get out of the way) to keep things moving towards your goals?
What Operating System is Your Agency Running?
It’s normal to feel like your agency is on fire…always. But, it’s not normal to stay there. As you figure out your role as an agency owner, it’s imperative that you don’t build a YouOS operating system.
If you do, you’ll stay stuck in a perpetual cycle of frustration where your agency owns you. Sure, you might fit in a vacation or two a year—but you’ll feel obligated to bring your laptop or have your phone on the entire time. If you don’t, things could crumble at any second because your operating system is giving you a shaky foundation.
Instead, upgrade to a scalable operating system. The kind that lets you go on vacation, turn your phone off, and come back to sunshine, rainbows, and butterflies (a.k.a profit, happy customers, and happy employees).
And remember—you’re not supposed to know it all. There are some agency lessons you have to learn from experience, but there are others you can learn from mentors. The people who have built multi-million dollar agencies have wisdom that can save you unnecessary blood, sweat, and tears.
We’ve brought those agency experts into DigitalMarketer Academy to give you Insider Trainings, Workshops, write Playbooks, and give you their Toolkit so you can learn from their mistakes, and grow your agency more efficiently (and enjoyably).
Check out DigitalMarketer Academy to see everything else included in your membership (like our community of marketers!).
MARKETING
The marketing lifecycle: An overview

Remember when digital marketing was simple? Create content, throw it over the wall, hope for the best.
Note that we said “simple,” not effective.
To be effective is more complicated, and this keeps accelerating. There are so many options, so many channels, and so many audiences, that effective digital marketing requires a term to which people often react strongly—
Process.
Very few people inherently like the idea of “process.” It brings forth visions of rigidity and inertia.
But there simply has to be a framework in which to produce and publish effective marketing assets. Without this, you have nothing but chaos from which productive work gets done accidentally, at best.
How did it get this way for the enterprise? How did things become so interconnected?
- Marketing isn’t a point in time, it’s an activity stream. It’s a line of dominoes you need to knock over, roughly in order. Lots of organizations do well at some, but fail on others, and thus break the chain of what could be an effective process.
- Marketing activities overlap. It’d be great if we could do one thing at a time, but the marketing pipeline is never empty. Campaigns target different audiences at the same time, and new campaigns are being prepared as existing campaigns are closing.
- Marketing involves a lot of actors at vastly different levels. There’s your content team, of course, reviewers, external agencies and contractors, designers, developers, and—of course—stakeholders and executives. Each group has different needs for collaboration, input, and reporting.
Some of the best business advice boils down to this: “Always understand the big picture.” You might be asked to do one specific thing in a process, but make sure you understand the context of that specific thing—where does it fit in the larger framework? Where does it get input from? How are its outputs used?
In this article, we’re going to zoom out for an overhead view of how Optimizely One helps you juggle the complete marketing lifecycle, from start to finish, without letting anything drop.
1. Intake
Ideas are born everywhere—maybe with you, maybe with your staff, maybe with someone who has no connection with marketing at all, and maybe from an external source, like an ad agency or PR firm. Leading organizations have found a way to widen the top end of their pipeline—the start of their content marketing funnel—and take in more ideas from more sources.
Good ideas combine. Someone has one half of an idea, and someone else has the other half. The goal of effective collaboration is to get those two pieces together. One plus one can sometimes equal three, and more ideas mean better ideas overall. Creativity is about getting more puzzle pieces on the table so you can figure out which ones fit your strategy.
How do you manage the flow of ideas? How do you make sure good ideas don’t get dropped, but rather become great content? The only way to publish great content is to get ideas into the top end of the pipe.
Optimizely One can streamline and accelerate your content intake using templated intake forms mapped to intelligent routing rules and shared queues. Everyone in your organization can know where content is developed and how to contribute to ideas, content, and campaigns currently in-process. Your content team can easily manage and collaborate on requests, meaning content development can become focused, rather than spread out across the organization.
2. Plan
Campaigns don’t exist in a vacuum. They share the stage with other campaigns—both in terms of audience attention and employee workload. Leading organizations ensure that their campaigns are coordinated, for maximum audience effect and efficiency of workload.
Pick a time scale and plan it from overhead. What campaigns will you execute during this period? In what order? How do they overlap? Then, break each campaign down—what tasks are required to complete and launch? Who owns them? In what stage of completion are they in? What resources are required to complete them?
Good marketing campaigns aren’t run in isolation. They’re a closely aligned part of an evolving body of work, carefully planned and executed.
Optimizely One provides comprehensive editorial calendaring and scheduling. Every marketing activity can have an easily accessible strategic brief and dedicated workspaces in which to collaborate. Your content team and your stakeholders can know, at a glance, what marketing activities are in-process, when they’re scheduled to launch, who is assigned to what, and what’s remaining on the calendar.
3. Create
Good content takes fingers on keyboards, but that’s not all.
Content creators need frameworks in which to generate effective content. They need the tools to share, collaborate, structure, stage, and approve their work. Good content comes in part from tooling designed to empower content creators.
Your content team needs a home base—the digital equivalent of an artist’s studio. They need a platform which is authoritative for all their marketing assets; a place that everyone on the team knows is going to have the latest schedules, the latest drafts, the official assets, and every task on the road to publication.
Content creation isn’t magic—it doesn’t just appear out of the ether. It comes from intentional teams working in structured frameworks.
Optimizely One gives your editors the tools they need for the content creation process, AI-enabled editing environments for fingers-on-keyboards, all the way through intelligent workflows for collaboration and approvals. Authors can write, designers can upload and organize, project managers can combine and coordinate, stakeholders can review, and external teams can collaborate. All within a framework centered around moving your campaigns forward.
4. Store
Leading organizations look at content beyond its immediate utility. Everything your content teams do becomes an incremental part of an evolving body of work. Content doesn’t appear and disappear; rather, it continually enlarges and refines a body of work that represents your organization over time.
Good creative teams remix and transform old ideas into new ones. They can locate content assets quickly and easily to evolve them into new campaigns quickly. They don’t reinvent the wheel every time, because they lean on a deep reservoir of prior art and existing creative components.
Digital asset and content management should store content in a structured, atomic format, allowing your organization to store, retrieve, organize, and re-use marketing assets quickly and easily.
Optimizely One gives your content team a place to store their content assets, from text and rich media. Content can be archived and organized, either manually, or by using AI to automatically extract tags. Content can be stored as pure data, free from presentation, which makes it easy to re-use. Your content team will always know where to find work in progress, media to support emerging campaigns, or assets from past campaigns. Brand portals make it easy to share assets with external organizations.
5. Globalize
Business happens all over the world in every language. To effectively compete around the world, your content needs to be globalized.
Globalization of content is a holistic practice that affects every part of the content lifecycle. Words need to be translated, of course, but you also need to consider cultural globalization—images and symbols that might change—as well as globalization for numbers, currency, and time zones. Going even deeper, you might have to make design changes to accommodate things like differing word lengths and the flow of text.
Beyond simply changing content, your work process is affected. When does translation happen? Who is authorized to order it? Who can perform it? How do you bring external translation companies into your internal processes, and how does this affect the flow of content through your organization?
Optimizely One helps you manage the entire globalization process, whether it’s done in-house or automatically via one of our translation partners. Your customers can be served content in their language and culture, and you can carefully control the alternate, “fallback” experience for languages not yet available, or when you’re not translating all of your content.
6. Layout
Some experiences need to be visually composed from a palette of content and design components. Designers and marketers want to see exactly what their content looks like before they publish.
In some cases, this is easy—everyone should be able to see what a web page looks like before it goes live. But what about your mobile app? What about display advertising? A social media update?
And what happens when you’re modifying content based on behavior and demographics? If you want to see how your web page will look for someone from California who has visited your site before and already downloaded your whitepaper on their iPhone…can you?
Content no longer leaves your organization on a single channel. Composition and preview is always contextual—there is no single, default experience. Leading organizations want full control over their visual presentation and they know that they need to see their content through the eyes of their customers.
Optimizely One provides the tools to visually compose experiences across multiple channels and can preview that experience when viewed through the personalization lens of whatever demographic and behavioral data you can dream up. And this works regardless of channel: web, email, display advertising—everything can be previewed in real-time.
7. Deliver
Content can’t do any good unless it can reach your customers. You need to publish your content to them, wherever they are, which means having the flexibility to push content into multiple channels, in multiple formats.
A consumable piece of media is an “artifact.” Your content is the idea and message that make up that artifact. Leading organizations develop their content separate from any concept of an artifact, then transform it into different formats to fit the channel that will spread their message most effectively.
Sure, make a web page—but also push that content to your mobile app, and into your social networks. Broadcast a text message, and an email. While you’re at it, push the information into the display panel in the elevators. Let’s be bold and broadcast it on the TV screens that play while your customers fill up with gas.
The key is delivery flexibility. The world of content delivery has changed remarkably in just the last few years. It will no-doubt change more in the future. No platform can anticipate what’s coming, so you just need the flexibility to be ready to adapt to what happens.
Optimizely One provides complete delivery flexibility. Our systems store your content separate from presentation, and allow multiple ways to access it, from traditional websites to headless APIs to connect your content to mobile apps or other decoupled experiences. Your content can be combined with internally-stored content or third-party content to provide a seamless “content reservoir” to draw on from all of your channels.
8. Personalize
Throughout this lifecycle, we’ve moved from content, to artifacts, and now on to “experiences.”
One person consuming an artifact—reading a web page, listening to a podcast, watching a video—is an experience. Just like one piece of content can generate more than one artifact, one artifact should enable thousands of experiences.
Technology has advanced to the point where all of those experiences can be managed. Instead of every customer getting the same experience, it can be personalized to that specific customer in that specific moment.
You can do this using simple demographic or technographic data—perhaps you cut down the information and make your content more task-oriented when you detect someone is on a mobile device. However, the real power comes when you begin tracking behavior, consolidating information about your customers, and giving them specific content based on what you’ve observed.
Leading organizations have a single location to track customer behavior and data. For every experience, they know exactly what this customer has done, how they’ve interacted with the organization, and they can predict what they’ll do next. Content and artifacts will morph themselves to fit each individual experience.
Optimizely One connects both customer behavior and demographics along with the tools to activate that data to affect your customers’ experiences. Our platform allows you to track customer behavior and match that with customer demographics—this includes behavior tracking for customers you can’t even identify yet. Based on that behavior and stored data, editors can modify experiences in real-time, changing content and design to match to what each individual customer is most likely to respond. Or let the machine do the work, with personalized content and product recommendations.
9. Experiment
No matter how much you know, customers will always surprise you. The right answer to persuading your customer to take an action might be something you’re not even thinking of. Or, you might have an idea, but you’re not confident enough to bank on it. And let’s face it—sometimes, you just love two different ideas.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could publish more than one thing?
You absolutely can. And you absolutely should.
Leading organizations let go of the idea that an experience is bound to one version of an artifact. Don’t just write one title for that blog post—write three. Publish them all and show them randomly. Let your customers tell you—by their next action—which one was the right one to use.
Experimentation allows you to try new things without the inertia of re-considering and re-drafting all your content. Ideas can go from your mind to pixels on the screen quickly and easily, and you can see what works and what doesn’t. Try a new title, or next text on a button. Does it give you better results? If so, great, keep it. If not, throw it away and try something else.
Refine, refine, refine. The idea that you publish content in one form and just hope it’s the right one is a set of handcuffs that can be tough to shake. But the results can be impressive.
Optimizely One allows you to quickly create and publish multiple variations of content and content elements to any channel. You can separate your content into elements and try different combinations to see which one drives your customers to move forward in their journey, then automatically route more traffic through winning combinations. You can manage feature rollouts and soft-launches, enabling specific functionality for specific audiences in any channel.
10. Analyze
The key to a learning and evolving content team is a transparent and unflinching look into what happens to your content after it’s published.
Analytics need to be considered in the context of the entire content domain. What content performs well but has low traffic? What content is consumed often but never moves customers down their buying journey? Customer behavior needs to be tracked carefully, then used to segment customers into audiences, based on both your content team’s observations and insights provided by AI.
Optimizely One offers complete behavior tracking and content analysis, showing you what content works, what content doesn’t, and what your customers are doing during every step of their relationship with your entire digital estate.
Juggle the entire lifecycle
“Publishing myopia” prevents most organizations from truly benefiting from the power of their content and marketing technology. Too many ideas are undercut by an obsession with the publish button. We rush content out the door and just throw it over the wall and hope it lands.
Within that mode of thinking, great ideas get trapped under the surface. Great content is delivered to only one channel in one language. Great experiences never see the light of day because content exists in only one form. And every customer sees the same thing, no matter how their own experience might benefit from something else.
Remember: the marketing lifecycle is a series of stages
Each stage builds on the last and allows content to grow from a random idea your team takes in from the field and turns it into a spectacular multi-channel experience which rearranges and modifies itself to fit each customer.
Juggling all of the steps in the marketing lifecycle can be done, but it’s easy to lose the forest for the trees and get too myopic about individual steps in this process. Leading organizations step back, consider the entire cycle from start to finish, and make sure their ideas, their products, and their messages are enhanced and strengthened in every step.
MARKETING
Comparing Credibility of Custom Chatbots & Live Chat

Addressing customer issues quickly is not merely a strategy to distinguish your brand; it’s an imperative for survival in today’s fiercely competitive marketplace.
Customer frustration can lead to customer churn. That’s precisely why organizations employ various support methods to ensure clients receive timely and adequate assistance whenever they require it.
Nevertheless, selecting the most suitable support channel isn’t always straightforward. Support teams often grapple with the choice between live chat and chatbots.
The automation landscape has transformed how businesses engage with customers, elevating chatbots as a widely embraced support solution. As more companies embrace technology to enhance their customer service, the debate over the credibility of chatbots versus live chat support has gained prominence.
However, customizable chatbot continue to offer a broader scope for personalization and creating their own chatbots.
In this article, we will delve into the world of customer support, exploring the advantages and disadvantages of both chatbots and live chat and how they can influence customer trust. By the end, you’ll have a comprehensive understanding of which option may be the best fit for your business.
The Rise of Chatbots
Chatbots have become increasingly prevalent in customer support due to their ability to provide instant responses and cost-effective solutions. These automated systems use artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to engage with customers in real-time, making them a valuable resource for businesses looking to streamline their customer service operations.
Advantages of Chatbots
24/7 Availability
One of the most significant advantages of custom chatbots is their round-the-clock availability. They can respond to customer inquiries at any time, ensuring that customers receive support even outside regular business hours.
Consistency
Custom Chatbots provide consistent responses to frequently asked questions, eliminating the risk of human error or inconsistency in service quality.
Cost-Efficiency
Implementing chatbots can reduce operational costs by automating routine inquiries and allowing human agents to focus on more complex issues.
Scalability
Chatbots can handle multiple customer interactions simultaneously, making them highly scalable as your business grows.
Disadvantages of Chatbots
Limited Understanding
Chatbots may struggle to understand complex or nuanced inquiries, leading to frustration for customers seeking detailed information or support.
Lack of Empathy
Chatbots lack the emotional intelligence and empathy that human agents can provide, making them less suitable for handling sensitive or emotionally charged issues.
Initial Setup Costs
Developing and implementing chatbot technology can be costly, especially for small businesses.
The Role of Live Chat Support
Live chat support, on the other hand, involves real human agents who engage with customers in real-time through text-based conversations. While it may not offer the same level of automation as custom chatbots, live chat support excels in areas where human interaction and empathy are crucial.
Advantages of Live Chat
Human Touch
Live chat support provides a personal touch that chatbots cannot replicate. Human agents can empathize with customers, building a stronger emotional connection.
Complex Issues
For inquiries that require a nuanced understanding or involve complex problem-solving, human agents are better equipped to provide in-depth assistance.
Trust Building
Customers often trust human agents more readily, especially when dealing with sensitive matters or making important decisions.
Adaptability
Human agents can adapt to various customer personalities and communication styles, ensuring a positive experience for diverse customers.
Disadvantages of Live Chat
Limited Availability
Live chat support operates within specified business hours, which may not align with all customer needs, potentially leading to frustration.
Response Time
The speed of response in live chat support can vary depending on agent availability and workload, leading to potential delays in customer assistance.
Costly
Maintaining a live chat support team with trained agents can be expensive, especially for smaller businesses strategically.
Building Customer Trust: The Credibility Factor
When it comes to building customer trust, credibility is paramount. Customers want to feel that they are dealing with a reliable and knowledgeable source. Both customziable chatbots and live chat support can contribute to credibility, but their effectiveness varies in different contexts.
Building Trust with Chatbots
Chatbots can build trust in various ways:
Consistency
Chatbots provide consistent responses, ensuring that customers receive accurate information every time they interact with them.
Quick Responses
Chatbots offer instant responses, which can convey a sense of efficiency and attentiveness.
Data Security
Chatbots can assure customers of their data security through automated privacy policies and compliance statements.
However, custom chatbots may face credibility challenges when dealing with complex issues or highly emotional situations. In such cases, the lack of human empathy and understanding can hinder trust-building efforts.
Building Trust with Live Chat Support
Live chat support, with its human touch, excels at building trust in several ways:
Empathy
Human agents can show empathy by actively listening to customers’ concerns and providing emotional support.
Tailored Solutions
Live chat agents can tailor solutions to individual customer needs, demonstrating a commitment to solving their problems.
Flexibility
Human agents can adapt to changing customer requirements, ensuring a personalized and satisfying experience.
However, live chat support’s limitations, such as availability and potential response times, can sometimes hinder trust-building efforts, especially when customers require immediate assistance.
Finding the Right Balance
The choice between custom chatbots and live chat support is not always binary. Many businesses find success by integrating both options strategically:
Initial Interaction
Use chatbots for initial inquiries, providing quick responses, and gathering essential information. This frees up human agents to handle more complex cases.
Escalation to Live Chat
Implement a seamless escalation process from custom chatbots to live chat support when customer inquiries require a higher level of expertise or personal interaction.
Continuous Improvement
Regularly analyze customer interactions and feedback to refine your custom chatbot’s responses and improve the overall support experience.
Conclusion
In the quest to build customer trust, both chatbots and live chat support have their roles to play. Customizable Chatbots offer efficiency, consistency, and round-the-clock availability, while live chat support provides the human touch, empathy, and adaptability. The key is to strike the right balance, leveraging the strengths of each to create a credible and trustworthy customer support experience. By understanding the unique advantages and disadvantages of both options, businesses can make informed decisions to enhance customer trust and satisfaction in the digital era.
MARKETING
The Rise in Retail Media Networks

As LL Cool J might say, “Don’t call it a comeback. It’s been here for years.”
Paid advertising is alive and growing faster in different forms than any other marketing method.
Magna, a media research firm, and GroupM, a media agency, wrapped the year with their ad industry predictions – expect big growth for digital advertising in 2024, especially with the pending US presidential political season.
But the bigger, more unexpected news comes from the rise in retail media networks – a relative newcomer in the industry.
Watch CMI’s chief strategy advisor Robert Rose explain how these trends could affect marketers or keep reading for his thoughts:
GroupM expects digital advertising revenue in 2023 to conclude with a 5.8% or $889 billion increase – excluding political advertising. Magna believes ad revenue will tick up 5.5% this year and jump 7.2% in 2024. GroupM and Zenith say 2024 will see a more modest 4.8% growth.
Robert says that the feeling of an ad slump and other predictions of advertising’s demise in the modern economy don’t seem to be coming to pass, as paid advertising not only survived 2023 but will thrive in 2024.
What’s a retail media network?
On to the bigger news – the rise of retail media networks. Retail media networks, the smallest segment in these agencies’ and research firms’ evaluation, will be one of the fastest-growing and truly important digital advertising formats in 2024.
GroupM suggests the $119 billion expected to be spent in the networks this year and should grow by a whopping 8.3% in the coming year. Magna estimates $124 billion in ad revenue from retail media networks this year.
“Think about this for a moment. Retail media is now almost a quarter of the total spent on search advertising outside of China,” Robert points out.
You’re not alone if you aren’t familiar with retail media networks. A familiar vernacular in the B2C world, especially the consumer-packaged goods industry, retail media networks are an advertising segment you should now pay attention to.
Retail media networks are advertising platforms within the retailer’s network. It’s search advertising on retailers’ online stores. So, for example, if you spend money to advertise against product keywords on Amazon, Walmart, or Instacart, you use a retail media network.
But these ad-buying networks also exist on other digital media properties, from mini-sites to videos to content marketing hubs. They also exist on location through interactive kiosks and in-store screens. New formats are rising every day.
Retail media networks make sense. Retailers take advantage of their knowledge of customers, where and why they shop, and present offers and content relevant to their interests. The retailer uses their content as a media company would, knowing their customers trust them to provide valuable information.
Think about these 2 things in 2024
That brings Robert to two things he wants you to consider for 2024 and beyond. The first is a question: Why should you consider retail media networks for your products or services?
Advertising works because it connects to the idea of a brand. Retail media networks work deep into the buyer’s journey. They use the consumer’s presence in a store (online or brick-and-mortar) to cross-sell merchandise or become the chosen provider.
For example, Robert might advertise his Content Marketing Strategy book on Amazon’s retail network because he knows his customers seek business books. When they search for “content marketing,” his book would appear first.
However, retail media networks also work well because they create a brand halo effect. Robert might buy an ad for his book in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal because he knows their readers view those media outlets as reputable sources of information. He gains some trust by connecting his book to their media properties.
Smart marketing teams will recognize the power of the halo effect and create brand-level experiences on retail media networks. They will do so not because they seek an immediate customer but because they can connect their brand content experience to a trusted media network like Amazon, Nordstrom, eBay, etc.
The second thing Robert wants you to think about relates to the B2B opportunity. More retail media network opportunities for B2B brands are coming.
You can already buy into content syndication networks such as Netline, Business2Community, and others. But given the astronomical growth, for example, of Amazon’s B2B marketplace ($35 billion in 2023), Robert expects a similar trend of retail media networks to emerge on these types of platforms.
“If I were Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce, HubSpot, or any brand with big content platforms, I’d look to monetize them by selling paid sponsorship of content (as advertising or sponsored content) on them,” Robert says.
As you think about creative ways to use your paid advertising spend, consider the retail media networks in 2024.
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
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