This article was published at Small Business Trends and reminds us that traditional media still plays a role but we need to continue to shift our marketing dollars into digital, and things like a clean, easy to navigate website, an active blog and a well-maintained LinkedIn page are still the first line of defense for your online marketing success, and social media messages are continuing to become more and more trusted by consumers.
For the full article, click here.
Not likely. Check out the recent trend in advertising in newspapers. Spending in newspaper is drying up, because it just doesn’t work any longer. The effective marketing strategy of the future is digital marketing, i.e. online.
How should you spend your marketing dollars to attract new customers and grow your business?
It’s not news that the way to advertise a local business is changing, but the speed with which it’s changing IS a little surprising.
Digital marketing is becoming an increasing percentage of most marketing budgets, replacing traditional marketing channels such as print advertising, television advertising and telemarketing. Each of these more “traditional” marketing strategies now has a digital replacement being integrated into websites and social media outlets rather than print or traditional television viewing.
According to the 2012 CMO Survey:
• Traditional advertising spend has, for example, experienced a 161 percent DECREASE over the past year.
• Print advertising has declined by two-thirds over the last 20 years, down from more than $60 billion in 1990 to just $20
billion in 2011.
• Statistics show that the average budget spent on telemarketing was cut in half in 2012.
For companies to have success now and in the future requires keeping up with, and moving toward, these constantly-evolving digital marketing technologies.
Marketing your business in 2012 can be as large a task, or small, as you want it to be.
At a minimum, any business whose customers and prospects find it through searches on the internet should have a website that does an outstanding job of the following:
so that your prospective customers will take the next action and contact you or come by.
If they don’t find what they are looking for at your website, they’ll find it your competitor’s.
In competitive markets, a greater marketing effort is required. If you want rank highly in the search engines in competitive markets, you need to establish yourself as an authority in your field. Online, this is done by (a) having credible, authoratitave websites link to your website, (b) by the social media presence you project, and (c) by the quality content you create onine (think published articles, blog posts, social media updates, press releases, etc).
Ranking well in a competitive market is almost always a time consuming process, taking anywhere from 3 months to a year or more depending on how established your competitors are and how much time and money they have invested in their own ranking.
As with most things, it pays to hire someone who specializes in SEO to guide you into making the right decisions.