The Biggest Marketing Challenge Yet

Over the past several years it has been getting easier and easier to market a business. Costs have gone down, barriers to entry have faded, and the web has made it so that anyone can have access to the whole world.

This price reduction and ease of entry is a great thing for small business, but it has come at a tremendous cost: It’s getting really crowded.

So many people are trying to market and sell their stuff that it’s causing big problems. It’s easier than ever to get started marketing a business, but it is harder than ever to get noticed.

Not only is it harder to get noticed, but once you do, be prepared for a tough sale: How much will this cost? What are the hidden fees? Let me see your credentials? Can you give me your competitors phone number? Do you have a money back guarantee? The truth is that nobody trusts anyone anymore.

The limits of human attention

One of my clients once explained this dilemma to me (she’s a neuroscience guru)—The human mind can only consciously process a small amount of information at a given time, and as a way to cope, our subconscious mind filters out anything that it deems extraneous.

At an average moment in time, our conscious minds are aware of less than 1% of the information our senses take in. Our subconscious minds are filtering out 99% of the information we sense before we even know it.

People ignore most advertisements without even knowing it

There are so many people marketing to us now that the world has become full of meaningless advertisements—and we just skip right over most of them without even noticing.

That’s right, many people who look directly at your ad will be completely unaware that it even exists. And the worst part is: this filtering extends to the web, social media, and everything else. The end result is that it is hard, and getting harder, to get noticed in this environment.

Broken promises and lack of trust

Given the problems with getting noticed, it’s no surprise that people have resorted to making huge claims and fantastic promises. It’s also not surprising that many of these promises have been broken, leaving consumers skeptical and distrustful.

This trust issue has become so bad that even when a company breaks through our subconscious filters and gets noticed, the most likely scenario is that people who see it will immediately discount and products as exaggeration, spam, or the same-old thing everyone else is doing. The majority of consumers (and most businesses) just don’t have any faith left in them.

This leaves small businesses with the burden of proving their trustworthiness.

Of course, there are so many business trying to make themselves credible and trustworthy that, like getting noticed, it is becoming harder and harder to do.

So where’s the solution?

Unfortunately, no easy solution exists—we’re going to be dealing with these problems for years to come.

Keep watching our blog though, over the next two weeks we’ll show you how to face these challenges and thrive in this crowded environment. Click here to subscribe so you don’t miss anything.