Marketing has changed. Have you?
If you’ve been on the home page of our site (if you haven’t, go there now, I’ll wait), you will have noticed one of the slides contains the above line. If you aren’t struck by the importance of those two short sentences, then read on. If you understand the importance of those two short sentences but don’t know what to do about it, then read on. If you think I’m just a really interesting writer, thanks, and read on.
Having relocated Sunstar Creative half way around the world, I have had cause for readdressing my own company’s inbound marketing strategy and thought I’d share that refresher with you, byway of a series of posts on this extremely important topic for all business owners.
I hope you find some useful tips, insights and ideas in these posts that will help you in tackling your own companies inbound marketing strategy.
Image source: blog.hubspot.com
So, you’re a business owner and you need sales. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling: widgets, haircuts, security software, websites, you don’t have a business without sales. How do you get those sales? How do you keep ‘em rolling in? That, dear reader, is the primary objective of marketing. Marketing is all about spreading the word in order to get people to buy what you’re selling. Let’s quickly list off some tried and tested marketing strategies:
- telemarketing
- direct mail
- print advertising
- TV ads
- tradeshows
All of these have one thing in common: they are all outbound marketing.
I’m not suggesting that these methods have not and in fact, are not successful. They are. I’ve used some of them and they’ve worked for me…some of the time. They’ve also cost me a lot of money over the years. Here’s the rub, those methods are, like it or not, becoming less and less successful. One of the main reasons for this is people are getting very good at blocking these marketing methods out. Think about it; you’re one of those people aren’t you. You leave the room to make a cuppa when tv commercials come on; fast forward through them using your Sky+, TiVo…whatever. You get a dump of mail through the letterbox and spend not a second on anything that isn’t a letter from your gran, or less enjoyable, the gas bill. Straight in the recycling bin, probably thinking, “what a bloody waste of paper“. And forget about sending unsolicited emails. Aside from being illegal and frankly annoying, it’s a sure-fire way of your business taking a vertical drop in the eyes of your prospective customers.
What do I do? Oh lordy, what do I do? I hear you ask.
Set up a Facebook and Twitter account and watch the leads roll in and the cash register overflow with large denomination paper money. Er…no. There has been far too much uncritical scrambling on the part of business owners and social media ‘gurus’ alike to get everyone riding the social media wave. Hang on a minute David, doesn’t your company offer social media services? Sure do. I think social media is a very important component to virtually every business. What I don’t believe is that all the marketing woes of, particularly small business owners, will be solved simply by tweeting an interesting article you found on StumbleUpon and getting friends and family to ‘Like’ your business’ Facebook page. Reality is much more demanding than that.
In my next post, I’ll get stuck into going about creating an ‘overall’ marketing plan. But in the meantime, please feel free to tweet; particularly about this blog post. See what I did there?
