Taking The Lead

Why is it called a meme?

In a world where 53.6% of the entire world's population is on social media it can be hard to understand how to keep up with your businesses needs while managing all of the new changes occuring. The average consumer is using 6.6 different social media applications per month, and spends more than 2 hours and 45 minutes on social media alone. This does not include the 5 hour average the U.S. citizen spends looking at their mobile device.

Many Business owners are not surviving the changes, and are finding it hard to stay up to date with each platform, generate leads, market their company, manage ads, vendors and their day to day operations. We are currently seeing the largest shift in how we do business since the industrial revolution. "The U.S. Small Business Administration recommends spending 7 to 8 percent of your gross revenue for marketing and advertising if you're doing less than $5 million a year in sales and your net profit margin – after all expenses – is in the 10 percent to 12 percent range." -U.S. Small Business Administration

It is critical that this money is spent properly for small businesses. What we are seeing now is companies signing up with several vendors that offer identical features, with maybe one additional one that the other does not have. This is causing them to misallocate funds and lose revenue quickly, finding the recurring expenses, training and updates impossible for them to keep up with. Training staff on these updates, and adjusting to remote work is causing devastating impacts on business owners.

We have seen this happen with companies like Blockbuster, Borders bookstore, AOL, Nokia and are now seeing it trickle down into the small companies as well. "According to the Small Business Association, 20% of small businesses fail in their first year, around 50% fail after five years and nearly 70% fail by their tenth year in business. With odds like that, it pays to know how to stop the bleeding." This occurs due to wasted revenue on outdated campaigns, incorrect use of social media platforms or targeting the wrong audience. Most of all though this occurs because after the ten year mark many business owners get comfortable and do not even see it coming. This is happening faster and faster as E-commerce and companies like Amazon survive even when nobody else is.