Traditional marketing methods need to be revised to fit the current landscape. If you use them, you'll be fighting tomorrow's battles with yesterday's weapons. Why?

The traditional marketing playbook is simple: identify a target audience, craft a compelling message, and push it through as many channels as possible. The goal is to find a message that resonates with enough people that some of them will try to find out more. That strategy does not work this year and will not work next.

Market conditions have changed, and we've entered a world where attention is the new currency. This is reflected in the stuff we watch and the platforms where we spend our lives. At any moment, we are being battered with countless professionally designed, volume-tested marketing strategies. Global online advertising spending over the last decade has nearly tripled, from around $100 billion to more than $300 billion in 2024. 

Competing in this old world requires either the budget to keep up with everyone else or the willingness to allow ad campaigns to yield mediocre outcomes. Did I mention a big budget? I should again. CACs (Cost Per Acquisition) have gone through the roof, and few have large enough ACVs (Average Contract Value) to justify it. And when they can't explain it, they rely on fudging payback periods… and take another round of funding to buy more ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue)/MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue).

Instead, today's great marketers (and tomorrow's average marketers) have moved towards a strategy of personalization. Instead of casting a wide net and hoping something catches, campaigns are being designed that understand the important things about their targets through the clever use of automation, lead profiling, and email magnets.

For example, there are moments of peak engagement in a buyer's life, usually identifiable through some signal within the data. If you know how to identify these signals within the noise, automated outbound can allow you to deliver these messages at these moments. Instead of convincing your client that the moment to buy is now, the task is now to convince yourself and your team. 

The buyer's journey has also evolved. B2B buyers are doing more independent research before engaging with vendors. Automated outbound allows you to provide value and shape the conversation earlier in the buying process. One-size-fits-all, broad-stroke campaigns are less effective in a world that expects personalization. If every buyer expects to have a highly personalised, segmented, and tailored message—anything else is immediately perceived as spam. There is no going back. 

There are other benefits to this new system. Traditional marketing struggles with spend attribution. It’s hard to know which particular actions are driving the results you want. With automated outbound, everything is measurable. It is much easier to tell what works, what doesn't, and where future spending should go. Traditional marketing also struggles to internalise changes in the market. With automated campaigns, campaigns are discrete events and strategies can be customised for each one.