Many a time Marketing is blamed for just “selling the sizzle” without giving a steak! The hype is abundant in marketing. Am not entirely sure why but there is more than usual hype when it comes to internet marketing or online marketing.
Every other day there is someone claiming that they have achieved #1 position in Google (for a very competitive keyword) and have stayed in that position for several months. There are some others that claim that they have made millions on the internet. Yet few others say they have “cheated” Google in its own game and they are ready to teach us!
Hype is empty promises or baseless promises or falsified claims.
In that spirit, let me tell you a couple of things that you should believe (especially, if you had thought internet advertising or SEO or social marketing will solve all the current problems in your organisation).
1. Yes, you can generate leads online. Do you know many organizations get leads and do nothing with them or still go broke? So, the leads are not going to solve any problem until you follow up with them, close the sale and collect the money.
I know of an organization that thought it could solve many issues in the Sales department by implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) system. However, even after it “went live”, the sales people continued to maintain their own spreadsheets for commission calculations and didn’t input the details of the leads or update the progress of the leads until they closed the sales. The boss later realized that the sales staff didn’t want to give away the info about the leads because that was “their power”. CRM is (just) an enabler like the Internet marketing is.
You need to have your processes to convert the leads in to long terms customers, you need to spend time (whether you outsource or do this work in house) in testing and improving various elements in your marketing and invest money to make anything work.
2. You may come across people talking about “viral marketing” or how their twitter or Blog or Facebook is doing wonders for their business.
Maybe you get motivated enough to start a Blog or Facebook page, see no results and give up thinking that it doesn’t work. Most of the time, the execution is the key. And sometimes, it may not be the right thing at all for your business or situation. Maybe email marketing will be more suitable for you instead of a Twitter campaign.
The data that you get from your analytics software can never be 100% accurate or precise (nothing is!) but you can make pretty good judgments and decisions if you interpret it correctly. Learn how to read them. Analyse and understand what the market is telling you before you do an email campaign or a twitter campaign.
Don’t waste money getting into internet advertising to appear cool or hip! Test it and take small, calculated risks. That’s the non-hype, in-your-face kind of advice I’d give J.
A bonus hype-free truth (keeping with my 80/20 belief): 80% of internet traffic goes to 20% of the websites. How much of the traffic pie in your industry are you getting?
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