Viva la Internet Marketing Revolution
Return On Investment
Every successful business executive wrestles with achieving the best Return On Investment (ROI) for every dollar they spend. Nowhere is that truer than when it comes to ROI for their marketing budget. If ever there was a gray area for determining ROI, it is in Marketing. Even your R&D investments can be traced back to some future return with a little effort. Not so easy with your marketing dollars. So how does the business exec determine whether an investment in some marketing venture is going to pay off?
Traditional Marketing
Any marketing campaign can be hit or miss, but your long term success can be greatly improved if you can measure what works and what flops. There have certainly been some tremendous success stories using traditional marketing methods over the years. Ask anyone involved in traditional marketing and they will tell you it is a long term process of trial and error. Immediate feedback is usually restricted to activist fringe users willing to provide inputs, either good or bad, but they do not generally represent the bigger audience you are seeking. When was the last time you got quantifiable feedback on just how much new business your Yellow Pages ad is generating?
Traditional Internet Marketing
Are we that advanced where we now have a topic labeled ‘Traditional Internet Marketing’? Are you kidding me? The internet evolves at such a fast rate that Vin Cerf (Google guru) equated an internet year to a dog year. Seven times as fast? I don’t know about that, but I do know we see new technologies and methodologies evolving at warp speed on the internet. Traditional Internet Marketing is practiced by almost every company we see online (some better than others); put a website up and hope they find you. In the olden days that actually worked reasonably well. How many billions of pages are indexed in the Search Engines today? See my point? The old ways just won’t cut it anymore.
The Internet Marketing Evolution
Wow, how many ways are there now to promote your business online? The smart companies are figuring this out. Search Engine Marketing, email marketing, Social Media marketing, mobile marketing… how many more (and derivatives thereof) can you think of? Beyond just slapping a few keywords in your meta tags and structuring your site to fit Google’s guidelines, there are a multitude of approaches to attracting more attention to your online presence. If you don’t have a blog, I ask what are you waiting for? Don’t think it fits your business model? Think again. Don’t know what to write about? Get busy brainstorming. Your competition is figuring out how to do it so you’d better get busy. Oh, by the way, did you know that your competition isn’t the same group it used to be? Welcome to the World Wide Web.
The Internet Marketing Revolution
Now here’s a little secret just for you. Your competition is trying to bury you. They are utilizing every trick in the online marketing playbook, but you know something they don’t know. You know what works. That’s because you figured out how to determine what truly attracts the people looking for your products and services, what truly converts them from a looker to a buyer. Through a series of micro-tests, you know that the place your competitors are going is not the optimum place to be. You know which conversion techniques give the best results because you tried them all through a series of tests that your online visitors didn’t even know was happening. But you figured out by using the very people you are targeting to help you define the path to success. It’s the wave of the future for those who can figure it out. For those who can’t, well they will be working for you someday.
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