This article is mainly aimed at business owners who didn’t really decide to jump in and leverage the full potential of online marketing. For those who have already seeing its potential you may be interested in some aspects of this article.

I could sum up this article with this one word: presence.

I could then qualify it with the word “increased”.

Take a second and look at the web (the internet) as just one channel. Just one big channel. Now ask yourself how fruitful that channel currently is for your business. If your answer is somewhat positive then ask yourself what if I could just double (triple or 10X) what I’m currently harvesting from the web.

Here’s a list of a few other channels:

  • Radio
  • TV
  • Billboards
  • Bus ads
  • Newspapers
  • Magazines
  • Flyers
  • Paper directories

I believe looking at the internet as a single channel bring about a realization that it’s another way to show that your company actually exists and is open for business.

In our current times, we are currently practically forced to have a presence online. Even more, that presence needs to be cultivated. And here are 4 main reasons why it is this way:

1. Online Presence of Competitors

  • Take a look for yourself but I beat you a pushup that your industry competitors are online.
  • Not online are they online but I beat you another pushup that they are probably working on increasing their online presence.
  • Today, many are hiring professionals or involving staff in the process of increasing their presence.

2. Mobile Power and Lightning Fast Discovery

If you take a magnifying glass and look at the channel called internet, you will find the world of mobile.

  • Today, more online search is done on mobile then desktop.
  • There are 190.5 million smartphone users in this U.S. accounting for close to 60% of the population (data from emarketer.com). And that number will continue to grow.
  • With a smartphone, you can easily find a business from almost anywhere in the U.S. Combine this with voice search and we’ve got lightning fast discovery of practically any shop and product.
  • And once you find that business you can very simply click on the phone icon for that business and call them. Wow!

When looking at the internet as a whole, mobile is the largest piece of the pie. So I strongly recommend taking a look at this and see how mobile could positively impact your business. It will be different from one business to the other but it’s totally worth the investigation.

3. New Ways of Running Ads

The utopia of marketing omnipresence can practically be reached today with mobile internet. You could use all of the traditional ad channels listed above and add to this cocktail internet ads and you’re marketing almost everywhere.

Here’s a few reasons why you should consider increasing your presence with online paid ads:

  • For example, You can target Facebook ads to specific audiences in precise areas.
  • Re-targeting allows you to show up on a multitude of websites after a potential customer visited your site, hence giving you that extra chance to have a new customer.
  • Mobile devices now show ads perfectly well.
  • You can harvest a tone of marketing data that will help you with you marketing in general.
  • The ability to change your ad budget or change any of your ads at any time.

The extensive learning curve to online ads is worth its while more often then not. And though somewhat complex, companies such as Facebook and Google are doing the best they can to make it as accessible to everyone as possible. Today, people can boost Facebook posts with the click of a button.

Here’s one more tip about ads I keep repeating to my clients: run the ads long enough to have enough data and results. A mistake that is often made is running ads for just a few weeks and then stopping because “it didn’t really produce any result”. It may take 3-6 months of continuous testing to finally find a pattern that works.

4. Reviews and Reputation Management

Today you can leave reviews on Facebook, Yelp and Google to name a very few. Also today, you can leave comments and reviews about the experience you had at Joe’s Cafe on so many different websites. Some of those comments and reviews will also be ranking and showing up when people search for you business name.

To my eyes, it is vital to establish an online presence and working on keeping your reputation to what what it is actually supposed to be.

Conclusion

I remember instinctively looking for a local bike shop repair or optometrist in my local paper directory. That was in the early 80s. And the paper directory was the go-to search machine. Today people are equipped with smartphones and tablets giving them access to unlimited online directories embellished with full-color images and videos. I’m taking a moment to say WOW, really!

Some business, especially local, may not need to fully explore online marketing capabilities since they may already be running at capacity without it. I believe this to be a vast minority. For the rest of us, let’s see how our presence can be increased on the internet!

🙂
Patrick