Businesses must learn to be entertainers or suffer the consequences
It is no longer breaking news that your competitor woke up this morning and probably had a meeting with their staff or themselves about how they can stand out in the ever-noisy social media scene this year.
So many other businesses are getting ready with their budget and hiring some lame marketing agency to help them plan their content strategy this year
The online and social world is officially a crazy and rough marketplace and some people think the loudest voice wins. You believe that they believe that, and many people starting their business this year will also fall for that.
I was in a meeting late last year with the marketing department of this company and I sat there listening to how this man who claimed to know the online world went on and on about content. In his words, if we want to be seen we should put more and more content out there and outpost our competitors.
Trust me that meeting was the slowest 1 hour of my life and I nearly puked every time I heard the word more. The same philosophy of whoever has the loudest voice gets the customer.
But the online world is different and that is what makes it cool and the best place for every business to grow and flourish. It is different from the physical marketplace and it comes with its playbook, laws, and approach. What makes it interesting is that these playbooks and laws are ever-changing.
Let’s take a look at Tiktok. At one point in time posting on Tiktok 3 to 4 times a day does the magic for businesses. You can be clueless with your content, clueless with your audience, clueless with your context and you are still going to get eyes down on whatever you are selling.
Even today those eyes still come to you but these eyes are not interested in what you are selling nor are they interested in your business. Your content just happens to cross their timeline.
The thing about TikTok is that it shows who viewed it and most times these are not conscious viewers. These people scrolled by after the first 3 to 4 seconds. So don’t be amused by the number of views you get.
I watched a creator complain that she gets 19k views and only 86 people will end up liking her videos and I laughed. I laughed so hard and wickedly and felt sorry for her. Life is harsh.
So this brings me back to the old guy who was telling these business execs that they need to push out more content to get more eyes in their business and more sales. The truth about such content is that it might work and probably does work but it is lousy, time-wasting, and excessive.
Let’s say for every content you throw out that way you get 100 views and in that 100 you get 2 buyers, so 400 views from 4 content in a day brings 6 buyers. So it works but you could be doing better.
You see, from an audience perspective, we are tired of seeing your boring content that does nothing but sell your boring product to us in a boring way. I don’t know if you have noticed but we live in an entitled world. 100 people are selling what you are selling so why should we care.
People are asking for more and most businesses are still sleeping on this fact. You must be tired of posting content and having your content returned to you with no result. The reason why this continues to happen is that you are yet to understand the exchange of energy.
As long as you don’t live in a cave you go through energy exchange every day with human interaction.
You meet some people and immediately you exchange the first words with them you feel life and you meet some and immediately you leave them you feel like 10 years have been subtracted from your life. You don’t know why this happens but you know it is a thing.
Your content has such energy exchange on people also. When people feel good after watching you talk about your product they gather around you like that fun guy selling ladies’ wear while sweet-talking them in the process.
If you are boring and not creative please close your business and dust off your CV, it is not by force to own a business. You can be doing something great sitting at the office and enjoying AC. But if you are ready to learn, ready to put in the work the first step is to subscribe to this newsletter here.
Attention is the new gold and entertainment is the metal dictator. Without entertainment your business will lose to the entertaining brands and the funniest thing about this is that even your marketing agency lacks the ideas to be entertaining.
The Gen Z kids and the TikTok culture have birthed a new type of marketing. The millennials invented marketing that cares, this is where you see brands pretend like they care about their customers but Gen Z is telling brands that if you are not making us laugh or feel some emotion of some sort we are leaving you on seen.
Yes, we viewed your video and yes the first seconds of it almost turned us into a sleeping beauty so please take your boring content somewhere else.
So to that manager saying post a hundred times every day I wonder if you will be able to survive the new ecosystem of the attention economy.
The current social media world we are now living in lives on two things; emotions and group thinking. This is the reason why the comment is the biggest treasure for any business, influencer, or online celebrity.
We want that instant review and we will seek it out in the comments. This is also great for businesses because now they can know what is working and what is not working. There’s nothing to hide anymore, the answers are in front of us both for the audience, customers, and businesses alike.
We watch a cool video and we are running to the comment section to know if others share that same feeling with us. We see some cool products and we are running to the comments to see who has used it before and why we should use it.
It is no longer the work of businesses to scream at the top of their lungs about their business and try to convince their customers that their product is cool. It is the work of businesses to have fun and share fun moments with their customers and watch these customers sing and sell their products in the comment section.
