Current reality is likely to be fantasy. The fact is that the four horsemen, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google are the winners. [Scott Galloway's book The Four Horsemen: http://amzn.to/2CWn5jv]
Their engines are huge, their pockets are even deeper and you have very likely spent a big junk of your earnings with these 4 mammoth organisations.
They are buying up all their competition whenever they pose a threat and will own the internet space for many a year to come, you might as well get used to it.
The only way you are competing on the internet is by spending on ads with Google and Facebook and at this time Facebook is the winner.
Facebook will make $60 billion at least from mobile ads by 2020, that's just in a couple of years time.
You are hoping that AI and automation will save the day and actually it probably won't. The only way you have a chance is to become super personal with your customers and potential buyers. This means spending more on the front end with training your employees to become outstanding communicators and making sure you retain them for longer.
Millennials will rage quit at the drop of a hat, so you better know what they value about your company and make sure you deliver this to them daily.
Lead generation is going to be a much hotter topic in years to come and you will be experimenting with many snake oil providers before settling down with something that you feel happy with.
Remember the customer knows when she's being sold to.
The best organisations are becoming better at storytelling and linking al their teams together and sharing the same message.
Here on LinkedIn in by the way is where this can be most effective. The trouble is most organisations ignore this potential and their employees LinkedIn profiles are a mess. Sorry to be so direct, but it's true.
When your employees have to become better communicators they actually have to become better storytellers. Their own story and that of the company they work for. A perfect blend of the two will create trust and loyalty.
Better get started...
Purgatory: the place to which Roman Catholics believe that the spirits of dead people go and suffer for the evil acts that they did while they were alive, before they are able to go to heaven. Humorous: an extremely unpleasant experience that causes suffering.