Internet Marketing. Do You Just Not Get How Important It Is?

I’m working with a client right now that has me a bit baffled.  I don’t think they quite understand how important their online marketing is.

We sat down and came up with a very simple yet comprehensive plan. Nothing fancy, just a new blog based website and an email campaign. Three weeks later…

I’m still waiting. The holdup is they want to launch the email campaign first since they already have (a very old) website and they are still compiling their email lead list. Ugh. It seems that their leads are all on paper forms that clients have filled out and they have to wait for their son to put them on the computer.

COME ON PEOPLE!
Hire a virtual assistant and have it done in an afternoon. Move forward. This stuff is important. Spend a little on this, OK?

I know that I have been preaching that social media marketing is insanely inexpensive but it’s not free. Yes, compared to conventional advertising; print, TV, radio, it is insanely cheap. If you do it yourself that is. If on the other hand, you are so unaccustomed to computers and the internet that you have to ask what Excel is then you are going to have to pay someone to do it.

Big business gets it. A new report by Aberdeen Group spotlighted by eMarketer shows that 63% of “best-in-class” companies’ surveyed plan to increase their social media budgets this year despite the recession. Another report that came out this year, The Forrester Report stated that “budgets in this emerging category (social media marketing) are still miniscule — three-quarters of marketers have $100,000 or less earmarked for social media.”

OK, admittedly no small business is going to spend that kind of money, but it doesn’t take that kind of money for a small business to buy in to social media. If you look at what you spent last year on advertising, and eliminated one print ad or reduced the size of them all across the board you could come up with more than enough to hire a professional to get you going in social media.

Hire someone to design a plan for your company and get it set up. Hire them to train you or an employee on how to use the applications. Then either take the time yourself to do it or make it the responsibility of a trusted employee. For next to nothing you are creating your own in house marketing department. It’s not rocket science people but you do have to put forth the effort to either do it yourself of pay to have it done. You can’t just not do it; you’ll get left in the dust.

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