It seems that every marketing tip these days includes a screaming imperative for some sort of internet-based social media. It’s so boggling I’m not even sure I said that right.
Rule number 1 in all business is you survive only if you sell things. Goods or services, it doesn’t matter; money only flows in when the register goes cha-ching. I found out a long time ago that selling is impossible without marketing. In the old days it was easy, you paid for ads. Nowadays you’d better be computer and internet savvy or you’re sunk. Right?
If you believe marketing experts, that’s right. My experience, however, bears a different conclusion.
Fearful that I might miss a sales opportunity, I’ve thrown myself into internet marketing with a zeal reminiscent of a dog pack at a kill. I built a website. Actually, I’m on my fourth or fifth (I’ve lost count), and actually I didn’t build them, I paid others to. The words “paid others” is a wretched recurring theme in this whole worldwide web business.
When blogs came into vogue I shot onto that bandwagon and got myself one. Wasn’t sure why. Heck, I wasn’t even sure what a blog was, but the experts shouted that I needed one, so by-golly, I paid others to set mine up.
Right after that people started inviting me to join them at LinkedIn. And Facebook. And Twitter. And MerchantCircle. Marketing experts howled that I must join! Fearing the next great gold rush might pass me by, I flailed about setting up accounts and accepting invitations. A few of the people who invited me I actually knew.
I could go on, there’s more. Especially the “paid others” parts. But what’s interesting is that sales of my software and books have been absolutely immune to all of these gyrations. I’ve tracked sales through each Smoking Hot Internet Marketing Revelation and can report with certainty that they don’t work worth a hoot. At least not for me.
I even tried Pay-Per-Click (PPC) through Google, Yahoo, and MSN (now Bing). If you’re unfamiliar, that’s where a potential customer goes to one of those search engines and types in a search phrase, such as “structural software”. If I’ve bid high enough for that search term, my company’s products will come up either in the right column or at the top of the list. This is a good idea in concept, but in reality it’s fraught with financial peril. First, most people on the internet are looking for freebies. My products cost money. Not a lot, but they’re not free. PPC could care less. Every click is charged to my account regardless of whether the person buys or bails. Pretty much they all bail. Another problem with PPC is that the best search terms cost a lot. For example, a top position for “structural software” on Google is going for $4.53 per click. That might not seem like much until you multiply out several hundred searches a day times seven days a week times four weeks a month…
To summarize my PPC experience, I spent thousands for a blip on a sales graph so small most would confuse it for a scab. After four months, I bailed.
So now what? Not only have I thrown a couple vacation’s worth of dough into the ditch that is the internet, I’ve consumed a couple lifetimes learning and trying to make it work.
The secret may lie in the word, “learning”. Here’s what I’ve learned so far:
* People buy things when they need them. Trying to convince someone she needs your product when she really doesn’t is hard. Very hard.
* There are ways to get people to buy your product even when they don’t exactly need it. But such means are not available to normal humans. For example:
o- Get a celebrity endorsement. I tried this and found that celebrities don’t want to talk to you unless: A) You’re a celebrity. In which case you wouldn’t need another one. B) You guarantee the celebrity A LOT of money for sales that have not yet occurred. I’ve never been able to convince even a non-celebrity that I could deliver on such a promise.
o- Spend so much money advertising that you create need. People don’t want to be left out of the latest fashion. So if your message reaches enough people enough times, they’ll figure they’re missing out and buy. Remember the Chia Pet, Rubik’s Cube, and more recently, the Snuggie? My wife asks me why I couldn’t have thought of those brilliant gimmicks. Maybe I could have, but the problem is I don’t possess enough money to force-feed them to the masses.
* People buy from companies they trust. They’ll even pay top dollar if they know the company is truly trustworthy and committed to service.
* If you’re a small company with a limited advertising budget, the most you can hope for using internet marketing is to get your brand out there, and to build trust. When a customer is ready to purchase, if you’ve done those things, your chances of a sale are better than those of a competitor who hasn’t.
* There are many companies eager to harvest your marketing dollars. Save your money. The best internet advertising, in my battle-scarred opinion, is absolutely free. It’s call a forum.
A forum is a little like a blog except it doesn’t restrict its benefits to only the person hosting it. Blogs and Twitter are great if you’re a celebrity because people, for some baffling reason, care what celebrities say and will visit their site. Not many people care what you or I think, let alone work up the gumption to post a comment about it. With a forum, you can be a nobody and still reach many, many people.
I recently joined a construction-related forum and started posting. Immediately I was building relationships and earning a readership. I got more feedback and notoriety from a single forum post than I have from a year’s worth of blogging. Why? Because it wasn’t just me spouting one-way rhetoric. Everyone in the forum community could either agree or disagree, and doing so is really easy. Talk about awesome exchange of ideas! Now that’s what the internet should be all about.
I liked that forum so much I set one up myself (okay, paid others) at ConstructionCalc.com. So from now on that’s where I’ll live, virtually. And I’d love you to join me. It’s 100% free, no pressure to buy anything, and your email address won’t be pedaled to anyone.
My goal is to create the place where builders, architects, engineers, and code officials gather to toss around tough construction issues. You can check it out here: http://www.constructioncalc.com/blog/userforum/. I strongly subscribe to the notion that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, so this forum also contains “humor, bragging rights, and other off-topic” topics.
For those of you who’ve somehow missed out on the internet social media marketing hoax, good for you. If you’ve been worrying that the Igoldrush Express is racing by and you missed the train, don’t worry, you haven’t. In fact, you’re probably dollars and time ahead.
I bet there’s at least one thing in this article about which you have an opinion. Please share. This article will be posted under the “Business and General” theme at http://www.constructioncalc.com/blog/userforum/.
I enjoyed the latest article. Where and how to spend advertising money efficiently and effectively has long been a mystery to me. We advertise primarily in the phone books. The fact that there are 2 of them now basically doubled our advertising expense to around $8,500/year. Somehow I think that was a mistake. They try to sell you on the concept that 1 good job obtained as a result of advertising more than justifies the expense, and that you’d have to be a complete idiot to pass on this sure-fire way to increase revenue. This may be true in the short term, but how many jobs have we obtained in the last 7 years as a direct result of phone book advertising? Is there any reason to think that someone shopping for a contractor would not look in both books, making the choice to advertise in both books redundant and a 50% waste of money? We’ve also advertised in a local economic development association’s annual book for around 10 years at an average cost of $700 or so. We have probably spent in excess of $60,000 on advertising over the last 10 years and have no idea what the net effect has been, but I suspect we’d be better off if we kept the majority of what we spent on advertising in our bank account. Cumulative errors are a b****.