ARTICLE
Take a tour of Twitter. One thing you won’t be able to avoid is a seemingly endless string of tweets touting e-Marketing this and e-Marketing that. Turn Twitter into a cash machine. Put Google gold in your pocket. I made $9,000 in one week with this e-marketing secret.
All I can say is, e-nough!
Man cannot live by bread alone. And a business cannot enjoy its full success on e-marketing alone.
While search engine marketing and optimization, along with its sister social media marketing and optimization, have taken center stage and advertising and promotion money is certainly flowing into these media, businesses — online or not — cannot ignore traditional media when putting together their marketing plans.
Successful marketing, advertising, and promotion each have at their foundation multiple touch-points and connections — the print ad that reinforces the television ad, the radio ad that reinforces the direct mail piece and so on. And, here is the key, they all can reinforce the Web site and/or e-mail. Your online world needs to be connected to the offline world. It can’t be treated as a completely separate entity.
Finally, hold onto your hearts, they all can pale in comparison to human interaction – telephone calls and in-person sales calls.
Too many small business owners have viewed the Internet as the holy grail. Perhaps more accurately, they treat it as a wishing well, throwing adword coins in the fountain and waiting for the riches to flow. It’s seductive, no doubt. No creative design struggles, no need to talk to people. Just turn on a magic “e” switch and, voila’, instant success.
Look, don’t get me wrong. A smart Internet marketing strategy — search engine marketing and optimization, social media marketing and optimization, and e-mail — is essential to success in the new world. But the online world is remarkably noisy. Getting your message through is becoming increasingly difficult without other, more traditional media to drive the message home and traffic to your business.
It also doesn’t hurt — in fact, just the opposite can be true, it helps — to zig while competitors zag. With so many companies jumping head first into the e-marketing pool, there is now a vacuum developing in other, more traditional, media. Opportunities now exist in television, print, and outdoor, and especially radio. As always, direct mail remains an outstanding option (and a favorite of mine), and there is a vacuum there, as well.
Small businesses must continue to explore and exploit e-marketing resources, but the smart small business owner will use more traditional media to drive Web traffic and support e-marketing efforts, as well as using those channels for directly generating foot traffic and building its brand.
