For more than a 10years, sales strategists have been advising businesses to move their marketing online.  Forward-looking companies have heeded this message.

However, many businesses still prefer traditional media such as TV, radio and newsprint.  So while typical consumers might spend 25% of their media time surfing the Web, these companies might only be investing 5% or so of their marketing budgets on websites and other online promotions.

Hello..  If this is you and your business….you need to get with the times and on the Internet, especially during the downturn.  Here are a few good reasons why.

Be where your customer can find you
It’s a given in marketing that you need to be where your customers are. So where are your customers these days?  More and more, they’re spending their leisure time online.

North Americans are among the biggest users of the Internet, notes a recent report on eMarketer.  In 2009, more than 69% of Canadians and almost 65% of Americans are Internet users.

Most of these Internet users spend at least one hour a day online for personal reasons.  Yes, they’re checking e-mail and managing their online profiles. But they’re also checking out products and services.

Local and global reach
The Internet is hyped as a medium with global reach that is available around the clock.  While this is true, you also need have a local search presents. Ranking on page one on a local search for your product/service is a goal to shoot.  It will separate you from your competitors.

Placement or “position” is key when advertising in traditional media. The same is true online.  For instance, if your customers are using popular social media such as Facebook or Twitter, you should be using them as well.

Quicker and less expensive
There’s a reason the postal service is called “snail mail.”  When you factor in the environmental costs of traditional mailouts (paper, printing, fossil fuels), e-mail marketing looks very clean indeed.

Your marketing budget is only so big: where will you spend it?  TV and radio spots are expensive, and these media channels are becoming increasingly fragmented. Online marketing, in contrast, is very cost-effective.

For example, radio advertising can require $3,000 to $6,000 per week.  Meanwhile, you can get your website optimized for search engines and conduct online marketing campaigns for just a fraction of the cost.

Yesterday’s news
Will print newspapers survive the economic downturn?  Several major U.S. dailies, including the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, have already ceased publishing; others are threatened.

In early March 2009, 24/7 Wall St. predicted that “eight of the 50 largest daily newspapers in the United States could cease publication in the next 18 months.”  See its list of the 10 major U.S. papers that will fold or go digital next.

Even newsprint staples such as the Yellow Pages are starting to look like relics.  In October 2008, TMP Directional Marketing reported that U.S. consumers searching for local businesses chose search engines (31%) over print directories (30%) for the first time ever.

The key word there is local, which applies directly to small businesses.  And you can bet that your competitors are aware of this trend.

It’s time to adapt
Showing some prescience, John Quelch of Harvard Business School, writing for the Financial Times of London in 2008, provided 8 tips for marketing in a recession.

The business prof concluded:  “Successful companies do not abandon their marketing strategies in a recession; they adapt them.”

So the key question is, in recessionary times, how are you adapting your marketing strategies to include more marketing on the Web?

Written by Rick Sloboda
Webcopyplus.com

This is the first in a series of videos by Zeno Blue eMarketing.

Do more of your customers use the Yellow Pages than the Internet?

If you’re supplying a product or services to a local market and still think that the two-color, half-page ad you are running in several local yellow pages directories is a justifiably better marketing spend than investing in improving your internet presence, you may want to reconsider.

Pretend at dinner, you bit down on an olive pit and broke your crown work. You pull up Google to search for “After hour Emergency Dental Work, city”.  Two seconds later, you get a list of Dentist names, addresses, phone numbers, maps, and website URLs. Just like that, you’ve instantly found what you wanted, without even thinking about where you keep the yellow pages.

This is a common scenario used to establish how integral search engines has become in our daily lives. But what about the online versions of yellow pages? Here is some other evidence for you.  In a September 2007 article written by Chris Smith for Search Engine Land, the trends he sites clearly show a decline in Internet Yellow Pages usage while search engine traffic continues to soar.

Chris writes,  “It’s my opinion that Google’s (and other top search engine) innovations in local search combined with increasing inclusion of business listing data in the search engine results pages (“SERPs”) is causing users’ behavior to change.  Users are finding more and more the information they’re seeking directly in SERPs, negating the need to find Internet Yellow Pages.”

When was the last time you picked up a heavy phone book to look for a business in your local area? Search Engines such as Google and Yahoo! are quickly replacing the Yellow Pages as the local business directory and search method of choice. Today, more than ever, consumers are replacing that printed local yellow phone book with the Internet, for local and national business searching, despite what the yellow-page sales force will admit. Local small to medium size businesses are just beginning to wake-up to this and are doing whatever they can to create a presence on the web.

Marketing your business online is all about your websites position in search results. Search engine optimization (SEO) basically comes down to 3 factors: On-page factors, linking and content. The best thing you can do to improve your search engine ranking and number of visitors is to build additional pages of text on your website and linking to the immeasurable amount of emerging local web directories and business review sites.

Zeno Blue eMarketing services will help to elevate your position in search results and increase opportunity for capturing new potential customers searching for your goods and services.

This search concept is much like the old yellow pages approach to advertising, except through an eco-friendly web presence.

Based on our experienced with online marketing here are a few common answers to that question:

For consumer products:

- It’s convenient
- I’m looking for something very specific
- I like to research my needs before talking to a sales person
- I’m shopping from work – it’s easier to use the web than a phone
- I can’t research the product/service I’m interested in through the phone book
- I can’t find my Yellow Pages book

For Business to Business products and services:

- It’s convenient
- I like to research my company’s needs before talking to a sales person
- I’m looking for a product/service close to my home
- I can’t research the product/service with the Yellow Pages
- I can’t find my Yellow Pages book

While any advertising source delivering a positive return on investment for your business is worth pursuing, there is a definite trend toward online research for both consumer and business to business purchases.

Effective advertising is largely based on getting your message in front of your potential customers when they’re willing to listen. Both forms of advertising do that, but the internet clearly allows you to say a lot more to those advertisers.

We think the anonymity of online shopping and research should not be ignored. Consumers prefer being informed before talking to a sales person, even if they plan on making their purchase off-line.

For example, buyers are researching product/service they’re interested in purchasing before they go to a retailer. If your website listing ranks high enough in search engines to be found by your potential customers, then proves to your customer that you can handle their business, you’ll generate well-qualified and cost effective leads for your business.

Just think about this: You’re using an internet marketing channel to read about yellow page advertising. Why aren’t you reading about it in the Yellow Pages?

Internet Marketing is marketing focused on getting found by customers.

In traditional marketing (outbound marketing) companies focus on finding customers. They use techniques that are poorly targeted and that interrupt people. They use cold-calling, print advertising, T.V. advertising, junk mail, spam and trade shows.

Technology is making these techniques less effective and more expensive. Caller ID blocks cold calls, TiVo makes T.V. advertising less effective, spam filters block mass emails and tools like RSS are making print and display advertising less effective. It’s still possible to get a message out via these channels, but it costs more.

Inbound Marketers flip outbound marketing on its head.

Instead of interrupting people with television ads, they create videos that potential customers want to see. Instead of buying display ads in print publications, they create their own blog that people subscribe to and look forward to reading. Instead of cold calling, they create useful content and tools so that people call them looking for more information.

Instead of driving their message into a crowd over and over again like a sledgehammer, they attract highly qualified customers to their business like a magnet.

The most successful Internet Marketing campaigns have three key components:

(1) Content – Blogs, Videos, White Papers, Ebooks: Content is the substance of any Internet Marketing campaign. It is the information or tool that attracts potential customers to your site or your business.

(2) Search Engine Optimization – On-page, off-page, link-building keyword/phrase analysis: SEO makes it easier for potential customers to find your content. It is the practice of building your site and inbound links to your site to maximize your ranking in search engines, where most of your customers begin their buying process.

(3) Social Media – Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Forms, Blogs: Social media amplifies the impact of your content. When your content is distributed across and discussed on networks of personal relationships, it becomes more authentic and nuanced, and is more likely to draw qualified customers to your site.

In this new world of marketing, outbound marketing strategies just don’t hold up when compared to Internet Marketing practices – things like SEO, PPC, and becoming an active participant in the blogosphere and social media. The better you become at working all facets of Internet Marketing, the more likely you are to show up on the first page of Google.

Today, the goal of marketing needs to be to “get found” by customers when they are looking, not “get in their face” when they are not looking.

1.  Build Relationships -  A company blog offers opportunities to dialogue with your customer’s unique way through the comment area in each post.  While marketing programs can generally only send one-way messages, a blog keeps the lines of communication open both ways.

2.  Build Your Reputation -  People like to do business with people and companies they feel they know.  Do your customers know what you stand for and what you’re trying to accomplish?  Do they know what’s important to you as a company?  You can post about charities you’re involved with, share customer success stories, demonstrate solutions you offer and problems you’ve solved, all with the end in mind of building your reputation and brand image.

3.  Build Customer Loyalty -  The more customers know you, the more loyal they become.  As you feature different solutions you offer, they are encouraged to do even more business with you.  Featuring some of your best customers will solidify their relationship with you and make your top tier even more loyal.  Most blogs will offer a subscription option through RSS and email, which means you, will have opportunities to interact with subscribers every time a post is published.

4.  Build Authority -  Consumers prefer to deal with a business that they have confidence in.  Once your business has established a blog it becomes the ultimate online newsletter.  Writing competent articles about your industry and aiming those articles at your target audience is a terrific way to demonstrate not only your knowledge, but your interest in passing this knowledge on to your customers.

5.  Build traffic -  Blogs are perfect for search engine optimization.  Search engine spiders like fresh content to feed on, and while a company website might be rather static with little need for content changes, a regularly updated blog provides fresh, keyword-rich content that search engines love.  This will cause your site to rank higher when potential customers search for your products and services and drive more traffic to your entire site.

According to a report by Advertising Age (click here to read the article), Microsoft is preparing to launch an ad campaign for a new search engine, code-named Kumo.com. The Ad Age report says Microsoft is working with advertising agency JWT to develop an $80 million to $100 million marketing campaign that includes TV, print, online and radio. The campaign is expected to debut in June.

The article said “According to one person close the situation, the forthcoming campaign will be careful to not position “Kumo” as a competitor to Yahoo or Google and instead cast it as a reimagined search engine that ups the game by yielding fewer but more-focused results.”

I recently found interesting statistics about Facebook.

1.   Facebook has 175 million active users
2.   More than half of Facebook users are outside of college
3.   The fastest growing demographic is those 30 years old and older
4.   More than 3 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
5.   More than 15 million users update their statuses at least once each day
6.   More than 3.5 million users become fans of pages each day
7.   An average user has 120 friends