The other day, my girlfriend was asking about a project we are doing and I said something like “blah blah blah, blah blah but this one is more on the Internet marketing end of things”. On hearing the word marketing, her face sort of screwed up. You see, she knows that I associate marketing with fairly attractive 20 something girls and young men in sharp suits who, way too often, turn out to be deeply unimpressive.
I wouldn’t want to seem dismissive of marketing and marketing services in general. There are concepts in there that are vital to the success of your business. It’s just that she works in one of those large companies and sees these types every day. They wanted to go into “business” when they left college. They were too posh for anything else so they did “Mawrrrrrrrrrketing”. She just didn’t see me as the type of person who swans around the place talking about branding while spending hundreds of thousands of someone’s money for some intangible result. It just didn’t seem like me.
This is interesting because Internet marketing has been the core of my professional life for somewhere around 10 years. I do occasionally talk about broad concepts like branding but she is right. I am way more direct than that, in general. When I saw the look on her face, I knew exactly what it was about and my response says a lot about the approach we take with our Internet marketing services.
My response: “No, not that kind of marketing. I mean. Get people to go to the site and then get them to do what you want.”
“Get people to go to the site and then get them to do what you want.”
I think that might be my mantra and you might consider adopting it as yours. If you are looking for Internet marketing services for your small business website (or for a large one for that matter), that’s what I’d be looking for.
If you are running your website yourself, without outside help then don’t forget this step. You don’t need to get into high minded concepts or flashy business talk and you don’t need to spend a fortune. You do need to get people to go to your site. Too many companies have put up websites and stopped there. With little or no traffic. They have either declared the site a success or a failure but they have stopped driving it forward.
In some ways, the only thing that surprises me about that is the number of companies that have sites that are obvious failures that have been declared a success. They look nice (hmm) and they are top of Google for the company name, job done.
You need an Internet marketing strategy. I’m guessing cash is tight at the minute, so you need one that is deeply practical. You need to get people to go to your site. Once they are there, you need to pay attention to your site and it’s content and then you need to get them to do what you want.
I tie all of the marketing I do very closely to it’s Return on Investment. The Internet gives that benefit. Not only is it more effective than traditional marketing options but its direct benefits are much easier to measure.
Your website should be making you money, not costing you money. If it is already performing, then you already know that it can make more. You simply need to get more people to your site and improve the chances that more of them will do what you want.
If you are marketing your business through your website yourself then I wish you well and hope that this blog can help. If you would like to find out more about the Internet Marketing Services that Sole Control Solutions provide then that’s fine too. Just contact us here. We’ll be happy to talk with you and obviously there is no obligation.
