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Offline marketing
Offline marketing
Why It’s Vitally Important to Trust Your Search Engine Marketing Company in a Down Economy
Jun 6th
It’s a fact of life in business that when there’s an economic downturn, the first thing that’s usually cut is available marketing spend, typically an unfortunate byproduct of accounting’s inability to justify costs without hard data in place. While the argument has been made numerous times over the years in books and articles that cutting budgets in a down economy is one of the worst moves you can make, I won’t rehash this old (but still valid) argument. Instead, I’d specifically like to address why cutting your search engine marketing budget in a down economy is a bad move, and why it’s equally important to place your trust in your search engine marketing company during a down turn.
It’s probably true for most businesses that there are fewer people actively searching for their products and services due to the economic climate. Companies reasonably approach this situation thinking, “Why should we pay the same amount in marketing that we’ve traditionally been paying when our current target market has shrunk?” This is a rational concern, but it doesn’t always lead to rational decisions – and it’s at this point when it becomes appropriate to break down the differences between push and pull marketing.
“Pushing” Your Message Out: The Traditional Method
With push marketing (by modern definition), you are essentially “pushing” your message out to various venues, such as billboards, magazine ads, direct mail, and radio and TV spots, trying to target your ideal customer. You’re spending money to reach mass audiences in the hopes that some percentage of them are looking for your products or services at just the time your message reaches them. Of course, if sales in your particular market have dropped by, say, 25%, you can expect that your push marketing results will probably correlate to the industry decline.
“Pulling” Your Market In: The Value of Search Engine Marketing
Enter the modern definition of pull marketing, such as the services that your search engine marketing company provides. With pull marketing, you are able to target a potential customer at the exact time he or she is seeking your products and services regardless of any declines in the marketplace. If your search engine marketing company is running a PPC program on your behalf, you should remain adequately represented in search engine results pages. If there are fewer people searching for the keyphrases upon which you bid, your costs for pay-per-click may decrease, but at least, in this case, it is a market-driven decrease based upon solid information rather than a decision passed down from someone far removed from marketing.
Another argument can be made for search engine optimization. Although the budget you allocate for a search engine marketing company and its services may be fixed, it’s likely that many of your competitors have lost their budgets, opening up the playing field and potentially allowing you to garner more of the business that’s still out there.
Establishing Long-Term Success with Hard Data
This takes us to another area especially important to businesses where long-term relationships are crucial to long-term success. In a down economy, people cut marketing budgets (including the crucial, but often overlooked online marketing efforts performed by their search engine marketing company), leaving a prime opportunity for you to use pull marketing tactics to gain market share while your competitors are left trying to “ride out the storm.” As previously mentioned, fewer of your competitors will be paying for ongoing SEO efforts or even allotting revenue for PPC campaigns, which opens up more potential search engine real estate for your company in the organic and PPC arenas and, quite possibly, lowers your per-click cost in PPC.
With push marketing, it’s difficult to attribute a direct ROI correlation. It can be tried – companies will use vanity phone numbers or URLs on a variety of different online advertisements or offline flyers, but nothing compares to the ROI metrics that can be provided by your search engine marketing company. Frankly, you can get as granular as you want with data – how much a lead costs, the exact amount of revenue generated by individual campaigns, all the way down to the exact amount of profit you made from particular keyphrases on the Google AdWords campaign between 4 and 5 PM on March 05. The bottom line is that it’s hard to argue with this data, and while many marketing pros are understandably in job preservation mode, it’s obviously valuable to be able to point to undeniable metrics that demonstrate success.
Don’t Cut Marketing; Build on Existing Efforts
Ever since the marketing department made its debut in the modern business world, it has seemed to be the first to get downsized or even axed during trying economic times. Of course, I feel that any marketing that has traditionally worked for a company should not be eliminated during a downturn. However, if budgets must be revised, I recommend you focus your remaining efforts on pull marketing, gaining market share, and concentrating on the metrics (acquired with the assistance of your search engine marketing company) to prove your ROI.
The Pro’s and Con’s of Internet Marketing
Jun 6th
Back in 2004 I created my first Internet-based Business. After spending 6 years in a service-based business as a marketing consultant, I decided it was time to leverage my time and create multiple streams of income. So I created an information product and dreamed of the days I would be waking up to an in-box full of orders and money automatically going into my bank account. In six months I would close my consulting business and say goodbye to working with clients and just sit back and live off the passive income my information product generated while I slept.
Enter Reality
While I did make money from my first information product (and looking back I actually did quite well considering it was my first venture into information products and Internet Marketing), it was a far cry from being able to close my consulting business and sail off into the sunset. What I realized is that it actually takes a lot of work to generate “passive” income on the Internet. Yes, once you make the sale, you don’t have to “service” the client per se, but you do have to expend a lot of effort to build your list and make sales. And once the sale is made, you still have customer service issues, fulfillment issues, and credit card issues.
Additionally, not all information products are created equal
It definitely takes more than writing a little ebook or recording and transcribing a teleclass series to create a quality, in-demand product. There is a lot of information available on the web − much of it for free − therefore you need something people can’t get elsewhere and that they absolutely feel they must have. As in any business, you have to be filling a need that isn’t already being met, or you need to be filling it in a way that isn’t currently being done. Yes, basic business principles do apply.
What I Realized
Fast-forward 6 years, many information products later, and studying Internet Marketing until the cows come home, I have realized that I don’t have − and don’t want − an Internet Business. I do not consider myself an Internet Marketer either. Nope, as I see it, I am a service-based business owner and I LEVERAGE the Internet to reach, attract, and serve people worldwide. And, that’s what I help my clients do as well.
Unfortunately, I see too many people who have been led to believe that if they put up a website, their business will instantly be filled with clients (meaning they won’t have to actually go out and find clients). While a website can certainly support a business and help you automate much of the client attraction, conversion, and customer service process, it won’t do it on it’s own. I actually believe most service-based business owners who are just getting started would be better served if they did NOT worry about the website, and instead focused on getting out there and connecting with and talking to people, and getting comfortable making offers for their services. You see, it’s far too easy and comfortable to sit at home behind a website or blog and THINK that’s all you have to do to get clients. Well, I hate to break it to you, but it’s NOT, not by a long shot.
I think too many people (myself included) have been “sold the dream” of making passive income online
Yes, there are people making a killing online. They are the true Internet Marketers. And they are a different breed from most service-based business owners I meet and talk to every week. They spend their time constantly tracking website statistics, conversion percentages, and keywords; working on SEO, affiliate marketing, Google AdWords, and mastering persuasive copywriting skills; measuring the effects of changing a headline or the placement of an opt-in box, or whether a page converts better with or without a photo. Have I spent many hours doing this stuff? Yes. Do I love it? NO! I’d much rather be working with people. (As a side note, I also thought at one point in my career I wanted to be a computer programmer, until I went back to college for a year to study it and realized focusing on that kind of detail every day would drive me insane!)
Most service-based business owners I know would go nuts if they spent their time on this stuff, too, because they thrive on engaging with and serving PEOPLE, not monitoring numbers and conversion statistics.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with Internet Marketing, but it is a very specific business model. And as with any business model, you want to be sure it “fits” you before centering all your hopes and dreams on it.
As a service-based business owner, if your gift is working with people, and you enjoy it, then by all means work with people
And, don’t let anyone tell you that’s not okay. I highly encourage you to leverage the Internet to help you reach and serve more people. Write a blog, publish an ezine, use online article marketing and email marketing as part of your marketing and customer service strategy, but recognize they are only PART of the strategy. Offline strategies such as teleseminars, live speaking engagements, attending conferences, even good old fashioned networking or direct mail, can also do a lot to connect you with potential clients, and move your business forward, very often faster than you can do on the Internet alone.
They don’t call it the World Wide Web for nothing
The Internet is a big place. And in some ways it’s easier to get lost in it, than to actually be found. Yes, having a website or a blog site is pretty much mandatory these days, but just having one won’t bring you clients. It’s kind of like expecting that just because you have a store front, you’ll have customers. In both the online and offline world, you have to drive people to your place of business. While, Internet marketing strategies are great because they’re very often free, there is effort involved, and in my experience as a service-based business owner, it’s most effective if you marry that effort with offline marketing strategies that get you out there WITH people, too.
