Today there are an ever increasing number of large national web-marketing service providers. They espouse the benefits of their search engine optimization, paid advertising and social networking services, but how does the small to midsized business in Michigan or Ontario choose the right Internet Marketing partner for their company?
Have you ever heard someone say, “Two heads are better than one”? When it comes to Internet marketing… this statement is absolutely true. Take a moment and think about how the brain works…
Right Brain – strategic planning
Left Brain – tactical execution
Now, think about this. Every successful Internet marketing activity requires three very important components:
And, here’s the catch… to do all three activities correctly, it takes both sides of the brain fully engaged. The left side of the brain gathers data and executes the tactical aspects of the program. The right side analyses the data and formulates the plan.
Where large search and marketing firms excel is in the narrow, focused, tactical executions of specific pieces of the plan. Unfortunately, it is impossible for them to do the “all-important” strategic piece of the marketing endeavor for you. This raises two important questions:
To answer these questions, you need to understand how search engine optimization and other forms of internet marketing work.
Let’s take search engine optimization as an example. A website optimization program is essentially the identification of specific activities performed both “on-page” and off, that seem to make a difference to how effectively search engines spider your website and find content relevant to the keywords that web surfers are using to locate that information. Although, search engine companies such as Google don’t tell us exactly how the search programs work, there is industry knowledge based on trial and error that has resulted in certain standard activities that should be done on your site to improve your rankings.
Large companies generally have a handful of experts (with the capacity to think strategically) in the marketing channels and they are tasked with understanding “best practices”. In effect, their job is to develop a “one-size-fits-all” system that can used for all their clients. Once developed, these companies hire and train a small army of technical (left brained) people who execute the tactics defined in the “system”. Like any good “assembly line” these same tactics are done repeatedly and predictably without deviation.
The secret to this business model (as it was with Henry Ford) is the volume of clients served. And though this may be a great business model for the service provider, it really does come up short for their clients. The reason for this is in the large company’s inability to properly and comprehensively customize their process to fit the unique aspects of your business and your particular marketing goals and challenges.
Additionally, because these companies focus only on a subset of marketing activities, they are not able to customize a holistic or multi-channel marketing plan for your company.
As a result, the small company owner who engages this kind of service provider needs to have the marketing savvy to understand what is being provided, how it fits into the overall marketing strategy, what an appropriate budget to set for this activity is and how to measure the outcomes as they relate to the whole picture. Unfortunately, 9 out of 10 small and midsize business owners do not have the skill, knowledge or experience to do this effectively. By far, the scariest aspect to hiring this kind of company is not knowing whether your investment (and these large companies don’t come cheap – usually charging their clients in excess of $300 per hour for tactical executions by junior technicians) is being targeted in the right direction.
What do I mean by targeted correctly? Well, for example, most internet marketing activities are based on a selection of important keywords – almost always derived from the business owner and a few of his competitor’s websites. The inherent flaw in this approach is that it assumes the business owner knows best. Unfortunately, without performing a thorough marketing analysis (not website which is all the larger companies do), the business owner has no objective way to identify and qualify these words and is invariably off base in the recommendations.
It should be obvious that to optimize your marketing investment, you need to have a strategic marketing plan. This takes a right-brained and business savvy individual with many years of corporate experience to understand the market parameters and nuances unique to your individual business and who will develop a comprehensive layered marketing plan that accounts for specific business goals, budgets and opportunities.
As a result, it is not possible for the large “assembly-line” company to adequately address this requirement nor do they even try. This is why a “boutique-style” marketing company such as CommerceTI has a significant advantage over the national firm. CommerceTI has the special blend of entrepreneurial business and marketing expertise (left brain / strategic) as well as the technical know-how and resources (right brain / tactical) to give our clients the edge over their competition. For the company looking to be number one in their market, CommerceTI is the best choice for their Internet marketing partner.
Take for example the experience of one of our clients whose industry had developed special terminology for describing and referring to their products and services. Had this client worked with one of the national optimization companies, they would have spent a lot of money and achieved poor results because the words they and their competitors were using (and recommending) were not at all the words being used by customers looking for their products and services. But because CommerceTI was able to look outside of the box and truly understand what was happening in their market – an entirely different campaign was developed which resulted in remarkable success for our client.
Another one of our clients engaged CommerceTI to develop an internet marketing campaign around what were acknowledged as good keyword choices (on a national basis), however after undertaking a proper marketing analysis, CommerceTI learned that these words were not at all relevant in the local geographic area targeted by our client. We were then able to recommend an entirely different approach to address the unique characteristics of this customer’s situation. Again, this would not have happened in the case of the assembly-line-driven service provider.
Our clients have many choices as to who they can hire to execute a search engine optimization or other internet marketing campaign. However, the advantage offered by CommerceTI is that our clients get full use of both sides of our brains. Not only can we deliver the tactical elements, we are capable of putting together the strategic direction as well. The benefit to our clients is obvious. They get a winning solution that allows them to excel over their competition and receive the best value for their online marketing investment. Two heads really are better than one!