TTMGi Blog

The New Marketing Mix For Small Business

There was a time, not too long ago, when if you wanted to sell globally you put up a website and if you wanted to sell locally you put an ad in the local paper.

In 2012 the split is not so nearly as clear and certainly the sands are shifting with respect to local press.

Internet search engines now have a much clearer focus on local search results and it is much easier to get targeted local results now by adding a location to the end of of your search. In fact you will also find a local bias on search results in many instances by virtue of the searcher’s IP address location and, often in the case of a mobile search, by your actual physical location.

On the other hand, the readership of local press is falling and will continue to fall and this is also true of national press. The internet is also biting into trade periodicals and so advertising through that route is also now far less effective than it used to be.

So you are getting the message by now that the old printed publications are on the wane and that the future is the internet – it has been like that for a while – so what?

Well, yes it has been, but it has been changing constantly in recent years and as the internet has bitten in to the effectiveness of printed publications so social networks are now biting into conventional search and this now gives us a real problem.

If the answer to the effectiveness of ads in the printed word is to whack up a website and promote the living daylights out of it, what do we do now if our prospect and customer traffic is being sucked away to social network orientated promotions?

This is a whole new level of marketing effort. With the printed word, you designed an ad and ran it for a few days or weeks or months. Tough to design the right ad perhaps, but once well placed there was little more effort to be made.

With a website, yes there is a fair amount of effort required to get the thing off the ground sometimes, but once it’s up in the air then incremental updates can be only moderately time consuming.

The social network beast is another matter: it is a beast that must be fed. Customers and prospects have to be connected to it and you have to feed it information: new developments, new ideas, new products, new, new, new …..

More of this later, but suffice to say for now that social networking is now a very important part of the promotional mix and has to be more than fitted in to the total marketing mix – it has to form part of the core.