There isn’t one. There is no single technique or strategy that will bring you all the success you want. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
Well, to be fair, I’m selling something too. I sell marketing and search engine optimization services to companies far and wide. But I won’t promise you a one-stop, be-all end-all solution to your Internet marketing problems. What I will do is put you on the path to success by giving you a foundation of knowledge and several SEO techniques that will prepare your business to go out into the digital world confidently.
So what about those magic bullets? How do I avoid getting sold one?
The first thing you need to remember when you’re reviewing any marketing proposal is that you’re being sold something. No one does anybody any favors, and nobody gives anything away. If you are paying $25,000, you’re getting $25,000 worth of value or less. You are NEVER getting more than that, because if they could sell it for more, they would.
Pretty easy, right? You’d be surprised at how many times I’ve had clients who got distracted by how much “extra” they were getting. In the back of my head when I read some proposals I actually hear Billy Mays shouting, “But wait! There’s more!”
The second thing you must remember is that there is no such thing as one-size-fits-all. Not in gloves, T-shirts or in marketing. What worked for your competition across the street, or for your buddy in his business is not necessarily what you must be doing. The key question you have to ask is, “How does this fit my marketing strategy?”
If you don’t have a marketing strategy, well, that’s another problem. If it doesn’t fit your marketing strategy, then it’s time to ask yourself another question. “Do I need to change my strategy?”
Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes no. How you determine the answer (and whether or not it will be the right answer) has to do with a third factor.
The third thing you must know and understand to make smart marketing decisions is the difference between strategies and tactics. A strategy is never a tactic, and (this is the more common mistake) a tactic is never a strategy.
What’s the difference?
A strategy is an overall philosophy for how you approach your marketing efforts. It involves looking at your overarching goals and determining what methods you will use to reach your market, and then applying your approach through a series of tactics.
What are tactics? Tactics are individual techniques used to achieve your strategic goals. That sounds circular, so let’s look at it this way:
Let’s say your media buying strategy is to reach the mass market through a combination of network TV (which has a broad reach but is expensive) and cable TV (which is much more fragmented, but offers the ability to build up frequency). That’s a perfectly valid way to approach the market for many industries, and is the basis of most advertising campaigns.
A tactic you might use in buying your media plan is to split your :30 commercials into :15 “bookends,” which are placed at the beginning and end of a commercial break, so that there’s a better chance TV viewers in this DVR world will see at least one of them.
Let’s move into the digital world for a minute and look at the same three items. The local newspaper sends your company a proposal for banner ads that will run all across their website (they call that “run of site;” clever, right?). It sounds pretty good. The whole site? Well, let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you know that only about 2% of the population is in the market for your product at a given time. So, while you have “run of site” on the local newspaper site that “everybody” goes to, what do you really have? Maybe not much. It depends on your strategy. What is the message you would be intending to send in these banner ads?
So right there, we ask those first two questions, “How much am I really getting?” and “Does this fit my strategy?”
The key here is that the answer to the first question is dependent upon your answer to the second question. And the answer to the second question is dependent upon your understanding of how to make tactical use of the marketing opportunity.
The value of a good marketing or advertising partner is that these questions are second nature to the practiced professional, and the time and cost savings of good advice can be monumental.
