And yet that isn’t obvious to an ambitious, or desperate, business owner.

Many times a business owner wants to have a quick hit that boosts sales now. Like a punch drunk boxer they’ll grab hold of anything that seems to promise to support their sales and give them a breather.

Using Yellow Pages

A business advertises on Yellow Pages because:

1. Everyone else in their market sector does
2. The salesman was very persuasive
3. They just felt “they should”

And often when it comes to renew the advert they will. And yet their advert is usually pretty much like most other advertisers in their section of the directory.

They become just a “me too” and then have to fight on price with all those other advertisers.

Running Pay Per Click Campaigns

PPC, or pay per click, campaigns are highly effective at driving traffic to a web site.

However, if no thought has gone into what the business does with the arriving traffic the vast bulk of the traffic is likely to be wasted because only 3% of people are buying now, this minute.

If they’re starting a new campaign their traffic immediately goes up (assuming correctly targeted keywords) and so do their sales. And the business owner never realises that their sales could have been much more than they’re getting for that pay per click cost.

Advertising in Their Markets Trade Press

Some companies who are thinking about their market may choose to advertise in their trade press magazines.

There tends to be 2 problems here:

1. businesses don’t stick with an advertising campaign
2. Adverts don’t have any call to action

The results are that few people respond to the one-off adverts that appear or even to those adverts that are part of a campaign if they’re not asking the reader to do something.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is often seen as a black art and businesses tend to shy away from it and outsource to specialist companies to do their SEO for them.

The problem here is that like Pay Per Click (PPC) if you don’t know what you want to do with the traffic you get it will simply click away to another site. And even if you do know what you want to sell them what do you do with the ones that aren’t buying now?

The other point is that if you’re not different in some way from your competition like a Yellow Pages listing you can become involved in a beauty competition that you’re not even aware of and lose the potential business to a competitor with a “better” web site.

Strategy Wins Every Time

The reason many people don’t use strategy is that unless they do use it they simply don’t realise just how many potential clients they lose by using a tactical approach.

I’ve listed some well known different tactics of getting business above.

If the businesses had worked out before hand things like:

1. how to handle non buying prospects
2. how to ensure they captured more of the Yellow Page eyeballs
3. made sure their site stood out and ensured that people signed up for more

The business would have got more sales. More sales they wouldn’t have had to chase. More sales means business becomes less about chasing any sale and more about chasing the right sale for your business.

That’s a more profitable and strategic position to be in.

Interesting…

Internet marketing has radically changed the way we all do business. Social media is one component of that. It’s the newest and it too has the ability to change the way you do business.

And it’s not by joining Facebook or hanging around on Twitter. Just doing that wont give you value in terms of sales, more sales and, much though I hate the word, Branding!

You need to know what to do. What’s the point in having to make the mistakes that us early adopters did. Yes I’ve got over 6,000 followers on Twitter.

So what? It doesn’t matter a hoot if they don’t make money for your business.

So think about this…

Have you a strategy to include and integrate social media into what you’re doing? Because if you remember it was only a few years ago that people were saying you didn’t really need a website.

And now you’ve got people making a very decent living from a business that sells purely through a web site. I’ve several clients who do exactly that. Can I improve what they do.

You bet!

Often people just don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t know what others have successfully tried either.

Even if they’ve been on internet marketing courses, or “how to do SEO” courses!

I conducted a social media course this month and this company has Facebook, a blog and are on Twitter. They were amazed when I showed them one very common technique that changed the way they looked at some of the Internet marketing side of their company.

So if that training can cause such a change in outlook why is there no funding to help business do it?

And by the way this isn’t a particularly small company. They’ve got real passion behind their business and want to do it well. But it’s still a case of you don’t know what you don’t know.

Do you know what you don’t know?

However, the unexpected amounts of snow meant that it was totally impossible.

I was looking forward to helping people decide whether Social Media Marketing was right for their business. And then if it was showing them strategies to use to make the most of it, whilst not taking all their time.

Why Use Social Media Marketing?

Firstly most businesses already use one form of social media marketing, also known as business networking. Where you go to meetings to talk with other people.

The reason you should test whether social media marketing is right for you is because it’s become another marketing channel and people may expect you to use it.

The Problem With Social Media Marketing

There are so many different ways to get involved with social networking. As I’ve said before, just some of those ways include:

1. LinkedIn
2. Blogging
3. Squidoo
4. Hubpages
5. Digg
6. Facebook
7. Reddit
8. Stumbleupon
9. YouTube

And on, and on…

So how do you decide what to do, when to do it or even how to do it?

Funnily enough my audience would have discovered exactly that!

The What, When And How Of Social Media Marketing

The first thing to is to decide what you want this type of marketing to achieve. That’s part of the what. Remember it’s internet based but can be used in every other marketing channel you have too.

The next ‘what’ is decide what you want to say, and who you’re going to say it to to meet your goal(s).

And the final part of the ‘what’ is to decide which tools can communicate your message most effectively.

There’s much more to it than that but for the moment let’s go on to ‘When’. The question that arises is when should we do this type of marketing. The simple answer to that is when you have something to communicate with your chosen audience.

Notice that I’ve been saying “with your chosen audience” and not “to your chosen audience” and the reason is that your audience is in a conversation with you. And they have the ability to simply stop the conversation dead.

If you simply broadcast stuff to them all the time it’s not a conversation.

Lastly we come to ‘How’ to communicate with them. This comes down to having a social media policy, choosing who will use social media on behalf of the company (ideally all of your employees) and then working out the most effective times to do it and the expected amount of time people should invest in working with social media.

Digital marketing is a set of tools that are available to any company. How to use them to best advantage comes down to deciding what strategy or strategies to use in  marketing the company.

After all if everybody in your market sector is on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter or any of the other social media sites how do you stand apart?  You’re part of the social media wallpaper. you can be easily browsed over before you even know you’ve had a visitor.

Instead your marketing strategy might call for tactics that don’t lead with digital marketing. Maybe your tactic is to run an advertising campaign in magazines you know your key customers (and their like) read. Or perhaps you could run a postcard campaign offering a nice freebie for calling you up, or visiting one of your digital marketing tools, such as your blog or maybe following you on Twitter.

Remember marketing is all about getting more leads, better qualified leads and more profitable leads into your sales funnel.

And yet when it comes down to it the digital tools we have available are simply a way of building a list of interested prospects and then funnelling them through to buy from you. 

And I think the problem we currently have is that digital marketing tools are springing up all around and there are very few true experts yet.

Twitter Marketing!

After all think of Twitter…

It’s only been going since the middle of August 2006. Not many people knew about it and it’s grown and grown to the current situation where there’s a lot of buzz about it.  And yet how many people could genuinely say they were experts in Twitter when new applications and clients are being developed for it all the time.

My own Twitter handbook is already outdated, although I do send email updates to the people who downloaded a copy.

And despite being on Twitter almost from the beginning I still discover interesting things about it all the time. And the challenge for many companies and "marketing gurus" is to make Twitter and other social media sites work for them.

Often the Internet is likened to the Wild West. I absolutely agree with that idea and just like the Wild West new boundaries are still to be discovered. So always treat any self-avowed expert with caution until you see whether they really understand the buzz words they use.

And when it comes to "digital marketing" that caution applies even more.