Koka Sexton dot Com

As a follow up to my post about Business 2.0 I figured I would make one specifically for marketing. The business post was a good overview and I was able to get some great feedback in emails and comments. I wanted to start posting on this subject so I am breaking this into a couple parts.

by gualtierocatrame

Marketing has been making a lot of shifts over the past few years. I wont go into the history of marketing and advertising in any detail but I think we can all agree that in today’s internet age these cycles have become much easier and also created some new challenges. Marketing as a whole is a completely dynamic process and changes quickly based on consumer and industry movement. That being said and with the fact that the internet has and still continues to grow and evolve exponentially marketers need to be able to shift on a dime and become much more creative now than they ever had to in the past.

Traditional marketing people have not, and probably will not stop blindly putting ads in places and attending events. You can’t throw the baby out with the bath water. These forms of marketing are necessary to an extent but there are more advantages to new forms of marketing that the former would never be able to capture. Anything you can do to get your brand awareness up is good. But how much time and effort you put into each is where the problems arise. In an age where you can gather information at 5000kbps you will be lost and forgotten if you are not creative.

Paying for a placement in a publication regardless of size will get some readers. Of course if you take out a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal you will get a serious amount of high level executives and business people to see your name. But is that what you want? Is this even the right market to go into? I’ll leave this to another post. But what I am trying to get at is having an ad in a publication may get your name seen, but it does not require any action on the part of the reader. Just scan the page, make note of the spot (or not) and move on to the next piece of news. The more creative you are the better.

The same goes with trade shows. Unless you have a large following in an industry, you are typically lost in the sea of other vendor offering like products. In my experience, unless you are the trade show like Apple is to MacWorld, you will always be a distant second or more likely closer to 6th place. Events are great to show your name, collect a few new contacts and see what else is going on in the industry. They are not meant to generate revenue on a large scale even if you are selling products at the event. What you can hope for is that you have made an impression on the peoples’ minds that entices them to check out your company again soon after they decompress from all of the other vendors they stopped by to get a free tee shirt from.

Also with direct mailings. What kind of ROI can you really expect from them unless you have a very targeted list and are offering a deal on a product these people can not live without. I call all of it junk mail and throw 99% of it out within 5 seconds of pulling it from the mailbox. Time is too limited to waste it reading fliers for things that are most likely a waste of it. This is the age of the internet and if I have a need, I will Google it.

These are some of the forms of traditional marketing and none of them should be discarded. But in this age, you should spend less time trying to figure out what size booth you want to have and more on the goals of how to build a community around your product and drive revenue to the companies bottom line. The industry has changed and we must change with it. I’ll explain how the web 20 movement can get both of these goals.

Your website. Take a look at it. Does the front page pop out at you, or look outdated and just like a wall of text. Sure you may have a picture or three on the site that will be your brand, maybe a customer reference, your product and maybe something clever that tries to express what your product does. But what is the rest of it? Are all of your links text based, or do you have buttons and specific images that can be used to drill into your site?

When I go to a website, I immediately judge the company based on what I see. It is your store front. I wouldn’t walk into a shop that looked like it hadn’t been updates in the past 10 years. The same goes for a website. Again, marketing is dynamic. How interactive is the site? I look at the contact page and see if there is more than a wall of text that gives an address and phone number. Do the product pages have the ability to view or download information that I want? These are things that consumers want when they are searching to fill their needs. If they don’t see what they want, they go back to Google and click on the next link.

Which brings up the concept of search engine optimization. If you didn’t think this was important, think again. There is a new business emerging for the professional SEO. How easy is it to find your company if the searcher doesn’t know you exist? If I don’t know the name to your company and I put in a generic search term, where will your company get listed? If your not on top of this you will be found closer to page 6 and not in the top 5. I started getting interested in this a few years back and the technology is now available that can get your business where it needs to be. I have helped sites from obscurity into being #3 on a search just by changing some back-end and front-end coding. Knowing how your customers search for you and applying some work into your website can make all the difference in the world.

“Selling to people who actually want to hear from you is more effective than interrupting strangers who don’t,” - Seth Godin

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