So Many Platforms, So Little Time: The Marketer’s Dilemma

Keeping Pace with Evolving Channels and Demographics

Marketing today is a complex affair. That’s not to say it was easier five, ten, even twenty years ago, but it’s certainly become a more varied and complicated discipline.

Depending on the company and budget, marketers juggle numerous platforms and strategies, including email, print, SEO, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, Google – the list feels endless. While the evolution of these channels has created incredible opportunities to connect with audiences, it has also introduced significant challenges. For one, the need to create tailored content for each platform places immense strain on time and resources. 

Busy calendars 

If you’ve worked in marketing for most of your career, the chances are you’ve seen some incredible change in the industry. Digital marketing has only been in existence for the last 20ish years, and it’s come from presenting primitive websites, with a degree of basic search engine optimisation, to being its own discipline in the marketing world. The campaign calendars of today’s marketers are chock full of content for a multitude of channels, and the variety of output must cover both overt paid advertising, organic content, and thought-leadership output, too. Everywhere is an outlet, and a way to connect with customers, and it can be hugely demanding on teams and budgets to get the balance right. 

Evolving platforms and audience demographics 

Not only have we seen an explosion of marketing channels over the last ten years, but those channels are also constantly evolving, and marketers must keep pace with them. Instagram, for example, was originally a platform for sharing single images when it launched in 2010; now, it’s a content-hungry behemoth, with options for users to produce text and image posts, reels, and stories just for this channel alone.  

40% of people under 25 prefer to use social media over traditional search engines such as Google.

As each channel evolves, so does its user demographics. Gen Z are the first truly digital-native generation, and their platform preferences and loyalty are far harder to predict or pin down. Channels such as TikTok are not only revolutionising how Gen Zs interact with brands, but changing the way they use the internet.

The content monster is hungry  

The sheer volume of content needed to feed this multitude of channels is immense. This increasing complexity and quantity forces teams to ask: Are we prioritising the right channels? Are we spreading ourselves too thin? And most importantly: how do we ensure that our messaging stands out in a sea of competition? All of this is part of the wider discussion of the Digital Efficiency Paradox, which we have written about in detail recently. You can read more about that here.  

Finding Solutions 

The marketing world will only continue to grow more intricate. In our latest guide, The Modern Marketing Playbook, we look in closer detail at this and other challenges that are facing modern marketing teams and provide well-informed strategies to help you maximise the output from your resources, produce better content, and empower your marketing team to achieve more - without spending more.  

For more discussion on The Modern Marketing Playbook, join our LinkedIn Webinar on Wednesday 29th January at 12.30pm, with our MD Lawrence Palmer, and Marketing Director Jonathan Cox. Register here now, and don’t miss what will be a truly enlightening and informative discussion.