One of the most difficult things for any business owner or strategist to do is to forecast the future. Case in point: even Jedi master Yoda couldn’t forsee the Sith threat in the Star Wars prequels.
When DanMatt Media was founded way back in 1994, the only service we offered was yellow pages advertising. Search engines and social media weren’t really around back then, and the yellow pages were in full-force and in high demand as an advertising channel. We knew that we had to expand our suite of services to continue to stay relevant as an advertising agency, and so we began the uphill battle of creating and establishing ourselves as a leader in digital marketing.
Though the yellow pages are still used (predominantly in the middle portion of the country) their usage has declined significantly in the last two decades. As a result, these days our growth is predicated not upon the yellow pages, but rather on digital marketing channels such as PPC (Google Pay Per Click), SEO (Google organic search), and SMM (Social Media Marketing). But while those channels aren’t likely to disappear at any time in the near future, history tells us that they cannot be counted on as a viable form of revenue forever.
That’s why we’re currently hard at work researching and identifying the next revenue stream for our company, while we still have viable and in-demand marketing channels to offer our clients. Identifying the next channel that your company can hitch its wagon to requires foresight, hard work, and a lot of luck. Let’s hope we have more success predicting the future than master Yoda did.