(If this topic interests you, check out our page on web marketing )!
Sometimes we technology people get so excited about one concept or another that we can’t help but make it sound like the Holy Grail. Web marketing people tend to be particularly effusive – if we’ve found a solution to a problem, it’s our instinct to shout “Eureka!” and broadcast our discovery from the rooftops. I myself have been guilty of this in my conversations with people about what we do.
So I want to say this – no matter how excited I may get about Buzzsumo, or silo structure, or proper keyword research, or any other facet of web marketing – no single strategy or tool is sufficient to seal the deal.
Aspects of web marketing work in aggregate. Don’t do one thing perfectly – do 50 things. Just do them. And you’ll be in much better shape.
This is something I’ve had to learn as an intern. I would concentrate on writing perfect blog posts, but I would not realize that page optimization was more important for a given client. I would be disappointed that I couldn’t see immediate results, not realizing my efforts weren’t focused where they mattered.
Let me give you some specifics of what I mean:
Not just your website: one thousand pieces of web marketing
Marketing in a buyer’s world (and make no mistake, we are living in a buyer’s world right now) means that every aspect of your business is a form of marketing. If you have good customer service, that will show up on review sites like Amazon and Yelp. If your workers love working for you, that information will eventually find its way onto sites like Glassdoor.
The point is that your business is transparent because of the internet – everything about you, good and bad, can be known and may eventually become part of your online presence.
Naturally, this is especially true for everything you do online. Let’s say your website is polished to a lens-flare sheen. It’s easy to navigate, has lots of useful information and well-done content, and is optimized to perfection for Google. If you have that, then you’ve done roughly half of what great online marketing requires. But if you aren’t on Google Business, Facebook, or Twitter – or even worse, you have inaccurate information on these sites – you are then neglecting the other half.
In a buyer’s world, the sum-total of interactions your customers have with your company represents what they think about you. Every department is a part of marketing.
Put another way – imagine you’re building a rickety Indiana Jones-style rope bridge across a deep chasm . On one side of the bridge are your customers, with all of their problems and needs. On the other side, there you are, with your unique products and services. You need to give them a way to reach you!
Now imagine everything you do for marketing – be it having someone responding to comments on Facebook, be it having online chat on your website, be it having a website that conforms well to silo structure, be it having well-written content – equals one wooden slat in this bridge. It’s okay if a slat here or there is missing, the customer can still step across the gaps, and the bridge doesn’t need to win any beauty contests. All that matters is that the customer can reach you without having to make any giant leaps of faith.
What this means for you:
From this fanciful metaphorical image, there are a couple of takeaways for your business:
- Marketing doesn’t just “work.” You don’t always change your image alt tags and see immediate results. You only see results when enough of the bridge has been built that your customers can get to you. If there are three missing panels in the middle of the bridge and your customers are only making it halfway across, you won’t necessarily know unless you make it your business to know.
- Many of the most important things you could be doing are easy and low cost. If you want schema structure built into all of your webpages, and offsite backlinks linking all traffic to blog posts, you might have to spend a fair amount of money to hire a professional. Or you could just make sure you have a Google Business page and achieve similar results. Of course, you would be most competitive if you did both, but not every business has an unlimited marketing budget. You work with what you have.
- It can take a long time to see measurable results from your marketing efforts.. This doesn’t mean that you only check in with your marketers every six months and give them carte blanche to do whatever they want. But, even though sometimes you can see results almost immediately, it isn’t the norm.
Modern web marketing is complicated. There surely are best practices, but there’s no one thing you can do that will fix your problems. Furthermore, much of marketing is about just doing the work. It’s cleaning up 404 errors and adding links. There really aren’t any shortcuts. Even if you hire the best marketing firm in the world, you can’t expect them to improve your revenue by much in a week. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it doesn’t take a genius. It takes some knowledge that is esoteric right now, but is becoming ever more commonplace, and some elbow grease. So roll up your sleeves, do your research, and start building your bridge. Your customers are waiting for you.
