Think Basis It's Good For Business

Almost anyone who has consulted with a large number of different companies will quickly tell you there are people who “get it” and people who don’t. The unfortunate reality is that a large number of very intelligent people are still anchored exclusively to some of the more traditional marketing strategies, and either fail to understand–or see value in–even the most basic online marketing. Oftentimes the end result is a company that continues to throw money at increasingly less successful marketing efforts, while ignoring online opportunities that could be delivering a much greater ROI. The following are a few of the basic approaches I’ve witnessed firsthand from different companies when it comes to their online marketing efforts.

“Our product can only be sold by people”

For some products this might be true to an extent; however, even if the deal is never going to be closed online there’s an excellent chance your client will be visiting your website at some point during the sales process.

One particular company I worked with was convinced that their solutions could only be sold by sales reps, and neglected to make anything over $350 available to their clients for purchase online. Instead, they opted for an ambiguously worded “subscriptions starting from as low as $100 per month” and a phone number for people to call if they were interested. Right away, this alienates anyone looking to purchase during an odd hour, when the call center simply can’t be staffed. Secondly, anytime you make a statement like “from as low as…” you’re starting to anchor your prospective buyer to a dollar amount. And, when the interested party finds out that his price is actually going to be roughly three or four times the amount you anchored him to, the value in your solution is going to rapidly decrease.

Because the company was absolutely convinced their product needed to be sold over the phone rather than online, all of their marketing was centered around getting people to call in. Not surprisingly, this resulted in a large number of calls from people that were not qualified buyers, and an equal amount of email correspondence from people looking to clarify a simple pricing structure so they could determine whether it was going to be worth their time to call in the first place.

The reality of the situation was that for this particular company, their product wasn’t something that could only be sold by people. In fact, it was a fairly straightforward product. The issue was they were stuck in a model that forced customers to interact with a sales rep rather than allowing them to do their own research.

Anytime you’re working with a website that forces someone to make a phone call before completing the transaction, you need to ask yourself if the step is really necessary. What is the compelling reason to keep the person from purchasing on their own? And, more importantly, am I losing out on business because of it?

“We need to be online…”

On the opposite end from the “stubbornly old-fashioned” is the brick and mortar company that has been successfully doing business for the past X number of years and is simply trying their best to keep up with the times. These are the clients that I sometimes feel bad for, as they’re often good people that know how to run their business, know that times are changing and they need to be proactive about their online marketing if they want to stay competitive, but just don’t have any idea how to go about implementing a strategy or gauging a campaign’s success.

These are the poor business owners that end up subscribing to services that “guarantee a top 10 ranking in 100s of search engines.” Although you could easily say it’s a buyer beware scenario, they are typically small businesses in which the owner is paying out of their own pocket for whatever services they receive, and a snake oil solution with a minimal monthly cost is typically very appealing.

One company I spoke with had been working with a service for six months that was geared toward boosting their incoming leads for DUIs in a very specific geographic area. During that time, the monthly service fees continued to add up, and not a single lead was actually attributed to any of the work done by the company they had hired. All of their leads continued to be almost entirely through word of mouth and from their more traditional advertising.

For companies like this the key is to take the time to educate yourself before you commit to a long term contract. Make sure you’re clear on what the deliverables are and whether or not you’re being sold something that can actually lead to increased business. Also, if it seems like too good a deal, you might want to do a little more research before you dive right in.

“SEO = Profits”

Somewhere in between the two previous categories is the company that is educated enough to know a little bit about how the search engines work, and has even seen a reasonable amount of success already. Often these can be some of the most difficult clients to work with because they sometimes get stuck on whatever buzzword they just read an article on and fail to step back and look at the big picture. If they just read an article on social media, then that’s what they need. Never mind that it’s a local jewelry shop that does about 95 percent of their business in store. Social media is what’s hot, so they need to refocus their efforts on that.

One particular company’s CEO was practically obsessed with adding money to their SEO budget. The company had been able to generate some huge amounts of traffic and he was convinced that continuing to spend more money on SEO was going to continue to boost their online revenue. However, from listening to his explanations of what this type of strategy entailed, it became clear he didn’t completely understand what he was spending his money on and how it would actually impact the success of his company. He already had a solid hold on the keywords he needed in order to be successful, and his money would have been much better spent on tweaking the site to increase conversions.

If you fall into this group, it is important that you continue to critically examine each solution that’s brought to you, and not get wrapped up in the latest and greatest thing. If your company sells adult diapers then maybe a company blog isn’t the thing for you, even if you just heard that all the cool companies are doing it. Similarly, just because you’ve had a solid amount of success with one thing, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t constantly be looking for other things to improve and for the strategy that will give you the most bang for your buck.

“We always want to learn”

The last category is considerably harder to peg, but you know them when you see ‘em. They’re the companies that have a solid handle on what they’re doing and are constantly working on ways to improve. They’re typically the industry leaders or the up and comers that are quickly gaining a competitive edge. These are the people you talk with that end up teaching you as much as you teach them, and they tend to be relatively few and far between.

However, there are plenty of them out there, and there’s nothing holding back anyone from joining their ranks if they put in their time, educate themselves, and always have an open mind.

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Tags: Business, Online Marketing

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