I thought it was my sales pitch but speaking to other marketers around the world, they are all experiencing the same thing.

Prospects, clients, people in general are waiting for things to get better.

Well guess what.  They aren’t.  At least not for a long time yet.

And they will never go back to how they were.

I was chatting with my buddy, marketing ace, Brain Meredith from The Marketing Bureau the other day and we decided that this IS the new normal.  So accept it, move on and grow with it or live in denial and …. well, you can work out the rest of that line.

Yep, fragmented markets, cluttered minds, information overload, new technologies, new ways of marketing – they are all here to stay. And it will get worse.

OK, so having put the majority of my readers further into distress, what can you do about it?

First up, recognise that more opportunity comes from a major disruption than there was before it.

Second, more millionaires were created during the Great Depression than at any time before or since.

Third, realise that if you don’t grab the new ways to market your business before your competitors, then you will be locked out.  This isn’t like “old-style” marketing where anyone can buy an ad.  With the Internet, it’s possible to create barriers around your position and your customers so that competitors will find it extremely hard to get in.  First mover advantage is very powerful.

Fourth, there are so many options with Internet marketing, that you simply cannot understand them all.  I think it was Vic Conant who said it takes 1,000 hours of practice to become an expert. If you work full-time on only one of the techniques, that’s six months you have to commit without doing any work in your business.  Hmm – which business owner can afford that time commitment?

As I see it, you have three options.

1.    Carry on as usual hoping things will go back to normal.
2.    Reckon you can get to grips with SEO, mobile marketing, social media, website conversion, video marketing (that’s 2 ½ years full-time) while still running your business.
3.    Call in someone who has already learnt this stuff so you get an advantage over your competitors.

Which one will you choose?

Technorati Tags: Marketing, new zealand marketing, Small business marketing

As an SEO guy, I look at myself as a translator… translating the language of the expert (business owner) into the language of the customer. And then using that language on the web pages. Those pages should be very specific so that searchers can find the answer quickly.

The only way to achieve this is to do a Search-term assessment exercise. I call it the STACA – Search-term, Traffic and Competition Analysis.

This shows the site owner the number of searches for each term but crucially for them, the level of competition that they can expect. That way we can target lower competition Search-terms which will get ranked faster than those with more competing pages.

This STACA has another massive benefit. It becomes the centre point to your whole business and marketing planning.

Why?

Because a good business plan is written around a solid market research exercise.

There are two main problems with any market research project:

•    Response and
•    Bias

Getting people to respond in suitable numbers, especially if your budget is limited, is a real headache.  How can you find people.  Where are they?  How can you get them to participate?  And many other questions too.

And however, well phrased the research questions, there is always an element of bias.  People will feel that you want a particular answer or they feel obliged in someway.  And the results are clear in the number of new products that don’t make the grade, sales profits.

So what better market research than the exact words your customers are typing into Google when they are eager to spend money.

It simply couldn’t be better research material.
You can use those exact terms in all of your marketing messages then – off-line too.

By finding out exactly what people want I’ve helped companies go from the obscurity of Page 4 to over 30 different Page 1 results.

They may be very small search volumes but when added together they come close to the big 600 pound gorilla terms they were failing to rank for previously.
That’s much better business for them and…… far better for the customer too as they can easily find what they want.

In business you will always fail if you don’t find out what your market wants.
Using good keyword tools, the market tells you what they want.

And for the local businesses or local branches of big businesses, t’s important to understand that around 60% of significant local purchases start with a Google search.

Finally, most people get the web process the wrong way round.

They spend hours and $000s agonising over the shade of a colour, the position of an image, what’s on the image. Then tack on keyword research and SEO if there’s any budget left. None of that is relevant to Google. None of that will get you ranked.

What will get you ranked and found is using the right Search-terms in the right places.

And it will help you write your marketing plan too.

Technorati Tags: 5S SEO, Market research, new zealand marketing, SEO

• Too many interruptions.
• There aren’t enough profitable sales.
• Too many projects or demands on your cash.

There are frustrations everywhere.

Yet many – probably most – business owners make it more difficult for themselves by making these three common mistakes.

• Not making decisions so projects don’t even get started.

• Doing things yourself to save cash.

• Using a generalist for the whole project instead of using experts for each component of the project.

The result is more frustration and more lost sales.

The year is only two weeks old and already I’ve seen an example of each of those.

One client has still not made a decision to go ahead with a project and it’s only a small one at that. It would add so much to their marketing. They are keen to go ahead but…. They haven’t decided.

A second decided to use just one module of my 5 step Google ranking method and to do the next two stages themselves. They wanted to save cash. The result?

It’s behind schedule. Worse – it’s not even done yet.

How much cash have they saved? But the bigger question, how many sales have the lost?

And a third client chose to use a service provider, a very capable one in their field but certainly not in terms of applying SEO. The result? A good looking site that only ranks for less than half of the Search-terms. And doesn’t rank at all for the preferred keywords.

Now they need significant rework to get their site working properly.

So, be brave.

• Make a decision.
• Recognise that cash saved is probably less than cash earned.
• Use a specialist to save you time, cost and lost revenue.

Technorati Tags: local marketing, new zealand marketing