While putting together a web event I am authoring, I’ve been reading a great many blogs, books and comments on the subject of online marketing. A common thread among novices is their desire for immediate results.
There appears to be a massive disconnect when it comes to the notion of hard work through considerable effort. Rock star successes online have contributed to the fallacy that riches are fast coming and easily gotten.
Even if a massive opt-in list were to fall into your lap, you still have to have a strategy in place to some how use these contacts to your advantage.
Online marketing is NO DIFFERENT than traditional offline marketing. The reason being, it is the same human beings from the same planet making the same purchasing decisions. Online scams are NO DIFFERENT than offline scams in that they promise a quick return for little to no investment. In both case the old caveat IS true: “If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.” I’m currently coaching a few companies with their online promotional activities. The hardest thing for them to hear when we start is the nasty comment: “You realize this is a long term strategy, don’t you?” It’s not as if I wish the process to be long, because I too, would love a faster sale. But as any good sales person will tell you, it is a long buying cycle. Nothing is guaranteed, and results are not consistent. Frankly, as I’ve mentioned it’s all hard work.
One truth with online marketing is that it can certainly be less costly to implement. Email harvesting, email mailings, blogging, commenting, social media and more can be more about effort than cost. You can as some of my clients have, job it out to professionals. Which ever way you do it, the return on investment can be greater than traditional offline models. Take direct mail for instance. Sending out 1,000 brochures and having 4% open them is considered awesome in DM circles. On the other hand a 15 to 25% open rate of emails is not unheard of in email marketing. I’ve had open rates as high as 35%, but 15 to 25% is my average. Tracking is also an immense benefit of online marketing. In traditional terms, unless you got a phone call, you really can’t tell if the DM piece was effective. Sales directly related to a special offer exclusive to the promotion is another way to test DM. With email marketing you can see where recipients click further. This helps to further divide your initial list into niches. Tracking is beautiful.
Everything in online marketing rolls back to your opt-in (or permission based) email lists. My event called ChaChing! Your How-To-Grow Business Expo is targeting small to medium size businesses to join together and promote to a large cooperative list. The result hopefully will be that thousands of small business Expo Guests will come to ChaChing! and register for FREE. Here, they will be able to gather tons of free information that will help them to grow their own businesses. I’ve been developing this project since last summer and hopefully the event will open this summer. So, as you can see, it takes considerable effort to bring an idea to our audiences. When I do start promoting, it will be fascinating to see what your response will be to my concept.
As I have said there are no guarantees, but with no effort, your ideas will fall of the tree before they blossom. Give yourself a chance and start right now to harness the value of your audience. It’s kind of sad, when a client who I’ve been trying to start blogging, finally does and starts to see the benefits of their effort, lament about how much farther along they’d be if only they had listened to my advice in the first place.
