This blog is inspired by a recent article published on The Drum, written by Hannah Ward. You can read the original article here.
The UK business market is still quite conservative.
We are not suggesting that the conservativeness of the British business market is comparable to closed or highly regulated instances. However, in the developed neo-liberal world, UK comes out to be quite conserved.
One such instance that supports the statement of conservativeness is UK’s attitude towards talking about money.
Talking about Money
Even though, in comparison, matters have been improving, research suggests that more than half the people in the UK are still not comfortable talking about money and their finances.
This discomfort does not just limit to external chats, but even extends to talking about finances with close friends and family.
Given the circumstances, digital marketing conversations with businesses is quite a challenge.
The Financial Side of Digital Marketing
In a broader sense, there are two angles to the presented challenge here:
Potential Clients – The challenge of talking to businesses about their finances and devising digital marketing plans. As a result, pitching solutions to businesses can be a stab in the dark. At Axies Digital, for instance if we are going to present our SEO or social media services, we may conduct some background research to get a guesstimate. For instance, we look into the average income within a business and compare it to the size of business we are dealing with. But, in most cases, we are still taking our chances with most pitches. As a result, we need to keep clearing that our plans are based on certain expectations and matters are adjustable based on ground realities. (Interestingly enough, after the first pitch, businesses are more likely to mention their expectations, rather than before. We will let you think about that for now).
Target Market – On the flip side, when finances are important from the perspective of the target audience, getting any form of engagement directly is a challenge itself. The target market, even after coming across such content that can benefit them, are less likely to share or comment. As a result, such content may not reach its potential and remain limited based on the viewership algorithms of various platforms, e.g. Facebook and Instagram.
However, there is a solution.
Making People Comfortable
Hopefully, you had a think about why people are more likely to share their views after our first pitches.
Put simply, they start understanding the risk and reward of spending on digital marketing. And, as a result, they become more comfortable with us.
In fact, we have had pitches where we requested the client to choose a lower monthly budget while the potential client was adamant towards choosing one level higher. (Let that sink in – the potential client wanted to pay more).
In all fairness, this is quite a unique case because we made it clear that we need further data before upping our digital marketing efforts for the potential client. However, the potential client was willing to extend the data gathering expenditure, setting the period to 6 months before considering an even higher expenditure.
But, in any case, this shows that once the client feels more comfortable, the financial discussions become more open. (We also have tons of examples where the potential client wanted to choose a lower budget. However, that is relatively more expected and still shows that talking about finances becomes a smaller issue when the level of comfort rises).
On the side of the target market for our clients and talking about money, we still have quite a way to go.
