To get caught up make sure you have read: Myths of Marketing Part 1

Myth Number 3: I have a website and I got that SEO package so look out world. I won’t have to talk to a customer or do anything, my website will do it all for me.

Answer: Not so fast there nitro, you have a lot of work ahead of you. The world wide web, now there is something as misunderstood as a 16 year old female. In fact we will stick with that analogy and I will explain how the world wide web is nothing more then a teenager in the world of marketing and advertising that has yet to truly show us all she has to give.

Before we get more into that lets talk about SEO. Search Engine Optimization is perhaps the biggest fraud to hit the marketing world in the last 20 years. This is where I begin to really make enemies. The SEO market for my colleagues in the industry makes a load of money and any time you mess with ‘loads of money’ you tend to make an enemy or two. But it needs to be understood what SEO is and how it can truly benefit you. While I can not give all the info here in, I will simplify it for you as quickly as possible. Optimizing your website for search engines simply means you make it easy for search engine’s bots to read your content and you make sure your content is updated regularly. That is it. Nothing more and nothing less. Now inside there you can set up analytics and tracking for different advertising campaigns and user interaction. Sorry to say, but there isn’t a magic bean you place in your website code and have a direct green stock to the giant world of profits.

Many SEO firms simply charge you $2000 to $10,000 a month to update your content while others spend time booking ad space for you on google and yahoo to get you traffic. There are a few out there that actually use the internet and the power of the analytics and create valuable data for your company to move forward with. Again a FEW SEO firms know how to do this. With all this said there is a fatal flaw with SEO or websites in general. You can have the best site design, the best code, the best SEO practices, but if you don’t have the people coming to your site, you have nothing. So how do you get the traffic?

While I can’t give away all the secrets on my blog ( call us at LIME 801-423-5463 ) I will try to clear up a few things. First of all to get people to your website you need to understand the web. Understanding that the web world has just begun to ‘grow up’ and can’t be trusted to be the same tomorrow as it is today, just like that teenage female. This means you need to be prepared for change and understand what you know today may mean nothing tomorrow. Second you need to be very aware that design DOES matter on your website. Ease of use and accessibility are keys to online success. Third you need to understand your web users. Ask yourself this: ‘Who will be using your online site and why will they be using it?’ Not: ‘What do I want my customers to do on my website?’ This is a vital key to success on the web. The web is not something you tell what to do, it something you let tell you what it needs. ‘It’ is your users and your website visitors.

The web world can be very helpful and very profitable if done correctly. The online world gives you more data then you could dream of if you are prepared to collect that data and use it. Having an online presence can be the difference between long term success or the loss of a retirement fund, it is all about understanding the truth about the web and the web world excepting you.

The last key on this myth to defunct is that once you have a website you don’t need human customer service on that website. Oh how wrong you are. By having a website you are opening your business up to even more communication with your clientele. This communication will give you the ability to create long term relationships and profitable alliances. By having an open line of communication with your clients via your website you will guarantee new revenues and will see referrals like you have never seen in any other advertising platform.

The final Myth I will tackle is: Marketing costs so much to do, I just don’t have the budget to do it. We advertise and my nephew does our designs and it is all we can afford to do.

Answer: Marketing doesn’t cost you money it makes you money. It is poor advertising that costs you money.

When you understand what Marketing is you will see how marketing isn’t what costs you the money it is not planning your advertising that will cost you money. Rather then going on and on about this let me use an example of a past client to illustrate this.

A few years ago I had a client come to me with a great idea to start a weekly city newspaper. They wanted to have the paper focused on a certain demographic and geographical area. They had the revenue stream identified ( ads in the paper ) and they had the production of the paper all set up. Everything sounds perfect right? They even had one of those new fancy websites, how could they need anything else?

When the client came to me they had produced 3 issues of the newspaper and each paper was costing them money as they could not sell enough ads and the advertisers they did sell was reporting back zero success. I took a look at the paper and first thing I asked is, “Well when targeting college students you need to understand they don’t have disposable income and ads for $2000 couches won’t do so well.” I quickly was corrected and boy did I feel stupid, “The newspaper is for downtown BellTown and is targeted to high income families not college students.” Oh yeah first impressions do matter.

See I was handed the paper and asked, “What do you think?” I have since learned to ask a few questions before going off on things. I spun this example to show the client that if I thought it was to college students what did they think the end users thought it was for? Had they talked to any of the readers? Had they asked for feedback? Had they looked at the design and compared it to other papers? All answers were a resounding, ‘no’.

We had a lot to do and a lot to listen to and change. The first step we took was getting data from the readers. Who was reading it? What did they like, what didn’t they like? The next step we took was reading through the handful of emails readers had sent in from the site. Now we had data, now we knew what the readers were looking for and now we ready to change the paper and get some results.

We then took this data to the advertisers that advertised in the paper, explained to them what ad messages they should send. We contacted a few local writers and freshened up the content. With in 3 weeks the newspaper could not fit all the advertisers in the paper and expanded it by 4 spreads to accommodate the ads and new content.

The paper quickly became a ‘problem’ for the local big boy newspapers and advertisers where seeing results. Readers felt a loyalty to a paper that was for ‘them’ and the owner, well he was happy. This cost a grand total of about $10,454.00 ( I have quickbooks! ) and within the 2 week after we finished with the client they had made a profit including my firms fees, production and sales commissions. The whole process took 1 week to implement and 6 weeks to completely complete.

So did it cost this newspaper money hire a marketing firm? No, it made them money. It cost them not to hire one.

I have countless stories and examples of this and I also have stories of when things just didn’t work. To be a great marketer, as stated above, you have to have failed. I can assure you this marketer has failed and looks forwarded to making my past failures your future successes.

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