I have been in the marketing business for 30 years since I first bought 28 books on the subject to help my ailing karate school. For the last 20 years, I have focused on golf, resort and travel marketing. In all that time I have done my utmost to keep up for I have never lost my passion for marketing. I was one of the very first people on the internet with my first website launching in 1995. I have read over 2,000 books on marketing, read blogs, watch webinars and study trends. This I can tell you the changes in marketing over the last two years are more profound than the previous 28 combined.
Almost nothing that worked 2 years ago works now!
- Website traffic has gone down every year since 2008
- Facebook has changed from a fantastic free tool to nothing more than classified ads, pay to play. With 1% of your fans seeing an average post
- Email still works but with open rates at their lowest point ever and collecting new data, harder and more costly than ever it’s a shrinking return.
- Five years ago, everyone was talking about the amazing power of marketing automation, the golf industry never even adopted it, and that too has lost some of its shine.
- SEO is harder and more costly than ever.
- Google ads are going for double digits a click!!!
- Newspaper and magazine ads are dead or dying.
- The cost of Facebook ads, still useful for data collection are up 300% in two years and will rise again this year. (Zuck needs a new superyacht the size of Cowboy stadium.)
- Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter…. Has anyone in the history of the golf business every made any money for the time and effort some spend on these?
- Apps nobody cares, how many apps do you use of the 50 on your phone?
- Bots? Even less exciting than trying to fix your banking problem, with your almost English speaking friends in Bangalore!
Oh, and the golf business is in the toilet to boot. As is the retail business, the magazine business, the taxi business and a hundred other businesses that have been rock solid for a century or more! Many icons will go the way of Kodak, Sears, Blockbuster, Saturn, and Netscape for one simple reason, they were not willing to change.
They simply repeat the same business models of the past, when these models are already doomed to failure. To make things even worse, in the golf business those models are five years behind the times, to begin with. For example, 80% of the industry never did get social media, and that boat has sailed!
Einstein’s definition of insanity was, “People who do the same thing over and over and yet expect different results.” If your current marketing plan looks a lot like last year’s marketing plan, you are in for a very rough year!
It’s not too late to fix it, but you have to act fast…
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