Local Business Online Marketing Thursday Thought – Removing the Blinkers

Improving Visibility and Removing the Blinkers

This weeks Thursday thought about online marketing is a bit, well… holistic.  I think far too many people end up chasing their tails and not looking at the bigger picture when it comes to the Internet.  Why are we all here?

For one thing and one thing only – VISIBILITY

The internet is a fantastic opportunity to have your voice heard.  Whether that voice is shouting about your latest offers or campaigning for change as a Charity, the problem comes when you latch on to the latest trend and buzzword and exclude everything else.

Once you start labelling and pidgeon holing your marketing efforts and not seeing the bigger picture, it’s easy to get stuck and go nowhere.

This post was inspired by a chat I was having about link building.  Now, links coming into your website are very important and like most things when it comes to marketing online, a whole mini industry has sprung up to provide this service or tools to do it yourself.  The guy I was chatting with was so focused on learning about links and getting thousands of links to his website he had missed the point.

Once you have all these links and moved up the search rankings, your website audience still need something to look at and direction to act. AND you need your website to stay there in the rankings to be effective, especially if it is your only method of getting your message across.

Yes, you can rank a website that has little to no content by link building like crazy, but whats the point?  You have achieved nothing, no sales, no leads, no relationship building…

Focusing on a single online marketing method to the exclusion of everything available else is blinkered.

Marketing your business online can be overwhelming, there are so many choices, so many methods that it is difficult to know where to start.  SEO, PPC, social media, news releases, twitter and on and on.
This is why your business needs a marketing strategy.  To boil it down to the simplest terms:

• Your goal
• What you need to do to reach it
• Do it

Notice I said simplest, but not easiest.  One size doesn’t fit all.  What works for my business may not work for yours.  This is why when I speak with small business owners the marketing strategy we work out together can be a combination of methods, both on and offline.  There is little point in me marching in and saying I’ll do 1, 2 and 3 here’s my invoice…

That does not benefit either of us.  You will not necessarily reach your goal as I wont know what it is, and yes I would be a few quid better off but have an unhappy client.

To sum up, think bigger picture.  Don’t just jump for the latest shiny thing or buzz word when it comes to your business marketing.  Consider your goal and work from there.  Of course if you want to talk to me about your local business marketing, drop me a note through the contact form or the Facebook page, I always reply even if we are not officially working together 🙂

Talking about link building reminded me of a video Matt Cutts from the Google team put together last year, I’ve included it here as it has some very important points too.

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