Let’s consider a trait that we can each benefit from, and most of us should work harder to achieve. I will tell it in personal terms, and then explain how it applies to marketing a business.
I am sure you must know somebody who makes you feel comfortable to talk with about anything you want to talk about. When I find myself encountering this rare-as-a-unicorn person who just wants to know about me, and the things I want, it almost feels awkward at first, but in a uniquely good way.
I am talking about those people who listen attentively and do more than just nod their head and yawn as you ramble, while waiting to assert their agenda. I mean the kind who draw you in and make you feel totally comfortable to want what you want, think what you think, and be who you are. You tell them things, because they actually show their interest in you.
When you encounter this type of person, it is easy to feel that their story has got to be a great one. Their expressed interest in you has made them more interesting, and it makes you want to know them better, and to hear their side. Suddenly, there is a desire to switch things around and make the conversation more about them, what they want, what they think, and how you can be a better friend to them.
I hope that you have had the privilege to know somebody like I have described here. If so, you are probably nodding and smiling as you think of the way it makes you feel about them. It may even make you want to ring them on the phone to catch up on things since you last spoke.
Applying Listening to Marketing a Brand
Think about how you feel in a scenario where a person really cares what you have to say. I don’t mean the kind who fake it, but rather the kind where you can sense a sincere interest in you. Don’t you want to be more like them?
Have you ever encountered this feeling that you are talking too much and listening too little? All of the sudden you feel a little bit like a conversation hog, but it is so hard to change. When you want more business, you have to talk more, and it becomes hard to remember those listening skills.
This “listening person” we all enjoy is often there, in the back of our mind, but they are very hard to emulate. What I described is a common dynamic of any relationship, but the special ones we think so kindly about are simply better at it than we are.
In business, we each have our agenda, and our sets of rules for what we think is the best outcome for our own interests. We plan things in ways that we will get what we want out of the relationship, and deviating from that plan is a threat. It is simply against the rules.
In marketing, it is very popular to be the one doing all the talking, and nod and yawn while customers try to tell us what they want. I see extreme selfishness every day in marketing. I see it most profoundly online, because it is easy for companies to scream louder when they think that nobody is listening.
It is important to notice when our set of rules and a selfish mindset diminishes our potential. This is a common outcome when we forget to listen and be that person who becomes more interesting simply by being genuinely interested.
Consider for just a moment the instances when it may be best to approach business as a bit more of an interested introvert, and less of an interesting extrovert. It may create a chance to reset your objectives and become a better “friend” to your customers. The outcome will often be that you will become more interesting, and others will think kindly and smile when they think of your business. The good news is that this truly is scalable to any size of brand!
Are you taking enough time to ask people “What about you?” I guess we could call compassion and listening matters of “growing up” or “wisdom”, but I believe that we can each do more to cultivate our listening and caring skills.
How can you better address the importance of listening to what people want? Will you do the necessary research? Will you take that extra time to slow down and get to know what people want and expect of you?
What do you have to say about this? I welcome your comments, and I want to know “What about you?”
Have you ever been hit by a stroke of Genius, telling you that automated directory submissions will help your ranking in search engine results? Maybe you thought that some nicely crafted meta tags would help your search engine ranking. I may be a bit too hard on people at times, but common sense just completely eludes many people when it comes to SEO (search engine optimization). Many website owners want to rank in the top of search results so badly that they will try almost anything. Well, as long as it is cheap, easy, and sounds techie-fancy.
When I started to write this, I was going to rant about automated directory submissions. Then I realized that I have touched on the topic of directory submissions before. I still have something to get off my chest, and I still have something to say about the toxic lies and misinformation that have been created surrounding the SEO industry. It is often fueled by greed and hope of getting something for nothing.
It is easy for liars to make something believable to people who know little about the topic. This has created an ugly monster of the SEO industry.
The SEO Monster Eats, Every Day!
In just the last spin of the clock, I have had several people ask me for information about automated directory submission services to improve their search engine ranking. It reminds me that most people really do not understand SEO. Judging from the glazed look on their faces, I can tell that many people really don’t want to understand. They just want it to magically work. I understand that, and I can imagine how frustrating and stressful it must be for non-SEO people to filter reliable information about search engine optimization through all of the common SEO lies (although this may help: 7 SEO Lies: How to Know When the SEO is Lying).
Outdated, Outrageous, and Downright Dishonest SEO Garbage
There is so much bad information and outdated material spread across the Internet that I think it would frustrate the heck out of me if I was trying to feel my way through it for the first time. What bothers me is how many people are out there trying to earn a buck by selling things that do not help, and even more commonly, severely damage paying customers’ hopes of being found in a search engine.
The world of SEO truly is like a foreign language to most people. They read something about SEO and meta tags, and they think they are on to something revolutionary. It just stuns me that with all of the great information out here on the Internet, how many people are fooled by the first scam they come across.
For some people, I think there is a sense that if it is written, it must hold some truth. Once they find out the hard way that it was a scam and it didn’t work, they either give up and hate everything about SEO, or they take the time to learn the difference and read something sensible and logic-based like “Good SEO vs. Bad SEO: How to Tell the Difference“.
Even in large corporate settings, I have often found people in the role of search engine optimizer collecting a nice salary who got their job just by spouting out a few industry buzz words. The people hiring them are either enamored by their “vast knowledge”, or just give up and offer them a job on blind faith.
A really hard pill to swallow is that most of today’s SEO “experts” have never ranked for anything significantly competitive. That is not a gouge against my industry, and these people are not my competitors. It is a statistical truth. To make this point clear, just have a look at the backlinks to most SEO websites and then see where they rank for the first four words of their home page title. Try this with the website of the SEO who reaches you by email, on the phone, or in a paid advertisement, instead of you finding them through a search.
Productized SEO Services Created a Monster
I think that productizing SEO and selling easy to understand pre-packaged SEO services has created and fed this monster. As an industry, those of us who sell SEO services realized a long time ago that it is much easier to package things up and say “Here is your price, and here is what you get.”
This certainly makes it easier to sell SEO. After all, it is easier for clients to choose from a list and compare it to what others offer. Also, it is a lot more profitable for the SEO to create something once, and sell it many times. The truth is that it is seldom what is best for meeting the customer’s objectives, and it creates a mentality that ranking well in search engines is merely a predefined set of SEO tasks.
This is not to say that things like SEOmoz’s SEO tools, SpyFu, and the squillion other SEO tools are not just great. These are tools, but like a paintbrush, they are only as good as the person using them. A tragedy that happened is when a lot of SEO realized that they could sell far more, and easier, if they promised something such as top ten ranking for “x” number of keywords and then price it and put it in a shopping cart for people to buy. There are countless types of SEO services being promoted with a “buy it now” approach, without any consultation, without any strategy, and with a promise of easy results.
Do you really trust anything that is so easy? OK, rephrase … Do you really trust anything that is so easy in 2011?
Directory Submission Service Example
I started my rant with directory submissions, and I will still use it as an example. “What is a directory submission service?” I hope that is what you are thinking, but in case you did not already know, I will explain it. It is a once-heralded way to automatically submit a website to long lists of search engines and directories, with a hope that it would help search engine rankings, bring more visitors to a website, and boost sales.
I suppose it seems logical to a lot of people that if they use SEO directory submission services to add their website link to a squillion directories and search engines, it will produce magical results. Now let’s clear this up. Seriously, do you think that a magical automated fix like directory and search engine submissions will be your pink pony ride to success?
Oh, and nobody else ever thought of that, so it will be revolutionary! Right? Search engines will suck that up like grape soda and will count all of those backlinks (links to your website) as proof that your website is valuable.
Rub a lamp, sucker! Maybe a Genie will come to your assistance, too.
The Productized SEO Monster Awakens My Inner-Sailor
There are just a few things which make it hard for me to hold back my inner sailor and refrain from dropping severely foul language all over my blog. People falling for things like automated directory submissions and other simple tricks helping their SEO efforts is one of those things. I just don’t think I can even be nice about this. Shit! Call it a temporary case of Tourette’s Syndrome, but this inner-sailor in me is wanting out pretty badly.
People who actually fall for things like this drive me nuts. I just want to say “Hey, Genius, do you want to know the truth, or would you rather waste more money and time to screw up your website?”
If you want the real truth about SEO, slow down, pay attention, and stop breathing those SEO fumes in the air. Spend some time to learn things that will actually work, and will help you to grow your business. For example, those links in the text of this article are not just there for me, and they may help you, a lot. Better yet, here is a link for some relatively easy SEO tips that can save you a lot of time and frustration: SEO Lessons You Should Know.
These tips will not cost you a penny, and will only take a short time to read. Maybe I am just full of hot air, but if so, go ahead and search Google for SEO lessons and see where that link I just gave you shows up in non-advertised, relevance-based organic results. Hint: It is not number two on the list.
I do not write about this because I am seeking a bunch of customers. I only work with a couple clients at a time, and I turn away far more than I work with. Yes, writing about SEO helps people to find me, but it is not just here to help me. This is here to help you.
Just one more thing! Have you subscribed to aWebGuy.com yet?
I have heard people question how Facebook can support 650 million accounts and remain free to users. Some people have even held the absurd notion that Facebook will someday charge users.
Funding Facebook is something that most users don’t give a lot of thought to, as they connect and have fun with their friends. Most people will easily overlook the huge volume of advertisement dollars Facebook generates from their ads. Advertising is a very successful business model on the Internet (REF: Google, YouTube, Facebook, and etcetera). It is how Facebook makes money, and those advertisements facilitate Facebook’s bloated $50 Billion valuation in January 2011.
Internet users are very accustomed to seeing advertisements. Many of us became relatively immune to much of the advertising, years ago. Yesteryear’s ads were not very well targeted, and many still are not, but that is not because of the tools.
As the Internet grew smarter, ad targeting platforms became smarter. Advertising targeting and reporting is vital to a campaign’s success, and so the tools have evolved to meet the challenges. Facebook has done extremely well in this area, and I commend them. Their system provides for excellent demographic, geographic, and psychographic modeling and targeting, and should not be underestimated.
Facebook advertising can be an excellent tool for business. Make no mistake about that! The information you can learn from Facebook’s ad reporting can provide great insight to a marketing campaign. I explained more about the value and usage of Facebook advertising in a previous article titled “Facebook Marketing: Pages, Customer Modeling, Promoting, and Awesomeness“. That article is great reading for anybody who wants to understand the value of Facebook marketing.
Here is my unqualified rant. OK, maybe it is a little bit qualified, but I realize that some people will whine, snivel, and argue that I am wrong. I do that to people. I give them something to talk about.
I know Facebook ads well. I have used the Facebook ad system for client projects of many types, and I have had a mostly great experience with it. Facebook reviews each ad submitted to their system, and either approves or declines it, and they are doing a good job of it. When a friend recently complained of having his ads declined by Facebook, I thought he must be doing something wrong. After all, I never had an ad declined, but now that has changed.
I finally had my first declined Facebook ad a couple days ago. At first, I thought it was no big deal. Then I realized how silly their reason was for declining the ad. I will show you the ad, explain why it was declined, and also why I think it was nit-picking on Facebook’s part.
First, I will explain that this ad was intended to reach a targeted group of people as a part of my campaign to stop providing marketing consulting services. You see, I am not-so-secretly tired of selling what I do. I love doing what I do, but I do not enjoy the short-sightedness and lack of strategy that I witness with so many companies when it comes to their marketing. I said it well when I wrote “When I Go to Hell, They Will Have Me Selling SEO“. That is because selling the kind of marketing services I provide often makes me feel like I am trying to explain quantum physics to third graders. Perhaps more to the point, it feels like explaining the color blue to blind people.
This ad was targeted at headhunters. You know, those executive recruiting folks. It was to lead them to my aWebGuy Facebook page. Specifically, it was to lead them to the “My Tools” tab of the aWebGuy Facebook page.
I am not applying to companies for open jobs, but I am interested in a long-term objective outside of independent consulting. I know, it may sound like a big step backward. I just want to enjoy my work without having to feel like a third grade teacher while talking with new clients.
I moved far beyond the typical marketing job ages ago, and the type of work that I am qualified for is often not advertised on job boards. It takes a slow-burn approach, and so I want to be sure that headhunters recognize my name when they find themselves seeking to place a new Director of Marketing or VP of Marketing.
The image above is my proposed ad, and Facebook’s reason for declining the ad was explained as follows:
“The image included in your ad is not suitable to appear on Facebook. Before resubmitting your ad, please visit our Help Center for additional tips and examples compliant with our Advertising Guidelines.”
At first, I thought “It is just a picture of my birthday cake. How could that be so offensive?” Then I realized that it was declined for a violation of Facebook Advertising Guidelines section 5 d iii. You may wonder, “What is 5 d iii?” Well here you go:
5. Prohibited Content
d. Ads cannot contain, facilitate, promote, or reference the following:
iii. Tobacco products;
Stand Up for Facebook Ad Rebels!
Here comes the silly part. Based on the targeting criteria, and Facebook’s advertising guidelines, I could have used a couple hookers and a bottle of Scotch, but not my birthday cake. I guess I must just be a real life badass if my birthday cake is banned from Facebook ads, but that’s how I roll!
I love marketing for clients, and I serve them very well, but there is a unique challenge to marketing myself and my future. When it comes to marketing myself, the approach is quite long-sighted. That is because I must be selective about the buyer. This is where you come in, and I am asking you to stand up for my rebelion. Do you know any of those headhunters who should be aware of me? Pass my name along, will you?
If you think Facebook was nitpicking, please click my “Like” button and share this to show that even the rebels have a place on Facebook. Otherwise, you can “Lump” it and just keep reading my blog.
One More Thing! Do you find my birthday cake to be offensive? Go to the aWebGuy Facebook page to see the entertaining back story.
I suspect that you want to know, “is Twitter good for SEO?” Either that, or your bum is feeling pretty sore, and you are willing to try anything. I am happy to help with the Twitter part, and I am sorry about your rump. Try pistachio, but don’t blame me if it doesn’t work.
I am surprised that more people have not discussed the topic of Twitter and SEO to provide their opinion-based answers. I think that a lot of people are afraid to touch on this, for fear of giving an unpopular answer, or being wrong. Well, leave it to me to tell you this: “Yes, Twitter helps SEO!”
Twitter can help with SEO efforts, directly, as well as indirectly when Twitter users share the information in places such as blogs, social bookmarking sites, and elsewhere. If somebody tells you otherwise, you are listening to the wrong SEO advice.
I read an article on the widely respected SEOmoz.org blog today that addressed the SEO value of Twitter. It reminded me how much I sometimes forget the importance of bringing things down to a very simple level. I guess I just forget that not everybody has done this “Internet thing” to earn food for the past decade and a half. I try to keep things pretty simple, but I know I can wing one over readers’ heads some days. I try to provide useful marketing and SEO tips, but if I ever forget to make them simple, I apologize. This one should be nice and easy.
I thought that the value of Twitter for SEO was pretty obvious to most users, a long time ago. Sometimes, when I see what other people are saying, I recognize that details like this can slip by some people. Here is a quote from the recent article on SEOmoz titled “The Social Media Marketer’s SEO Checklist“:
“So for a long time, most SEOs blew off links from social sites like Twitter and Facebook since they didn’t have much direct SEO value because the links are almost always nofollowed [learn more about nofollow]. Now that we know that Google and Bing use Twitter and Facebook to influence regular search results, it’s time to start thinking about how the person in charge of Social Media can start to think like an SEO as well.”
The article had some good points, but it really did take me back to grammar school. Quoting the article, “Now that we know” … what? Holy hemorrhoid! I guess I assumed that we knew this kind of thing years ago. Links from my old Yahoo chat groups in 1998 helped my SEO, but is that revolutionary, too? It was kind of funny to me how much it resembled something I said in early 2009 when I wrote the book “Twitter for Business: Twitter for Friends“. Here is a statement I made in the book, and I stand by it today:
“Many search engine optimizers (SEO) will overlook the value of Twitter for improving search engine penetration. If they miss this part, they are making a big mistake. A reason many SEO will dismiss this value is that Twitter uses the “nofollow” attribute in outbound links. Make no mistake; Twitter can greatly enhance your visibility in search engine results.”
Heck, maybe the Internet is coming up to speed, or maybe I am just one of those people who are as strange as a pickled duck fart and foresee things in some uncanny way. I don’t know … maybe it is a combination.
Do More Tweets Help SEO?
This should be obvious, but the impact of more people tweeting your website content may be even higher than you imagined. Whenever somebody tweets your linked content, it creates links to your website. The quality and quantity of inks to a website are the most important factors that search engines use to gauge the importance of a website. Also, the links Twitter produces are not necessarily only on Twitter. There are a lot of services which aggregate Twitter’ed content, as well as many widgets and other syndication through RSS in which it may appear on other websites.
It will be far more important for other people to tweet your content than just tweeting your link a squillion times. Don’t bother with that, because it is not going to make you a ton of new friends. A few times is fine, but let’s not go out of the way to garner death threats, and insults about your mother.
Do More Twitter Followers Help SEO?
I am the last person who would wish to promote a “Twitter follower-frenzy”, so I almost hate to say this. Many indicators will suggest that more followers on Twitter can improve the SEO value of a tweet. Yes, a high follower count does correlate to higher SEO value, but I believe it correlates even better with the number of Twitter lists a person is on and other measurements.
I know that a lot of people want to become popular on Twitter, but before you implement some off the cuff plan, be sure to read the article titled “How To Become Popular on Twitter Without Actually Being Useful“. If you do the things that many moronic marketers suggest, people will wish a bad case of herpes on you and throw you on a flaming bed of nails before they will care to listen to you … or buy your stuff.
There is not much that I dislike more than a bunch of bad marketers out there with nothing useful to say. I think that millions of Twitter users would agree with me on this. Don’t take this as any suggestion that you go and try to gather as many Twitter followers as you can. Instead, I recommend, as I always have, that you be useful. As with anything SEO-related, being useful and providing compelling information is what matters the most. If you can do that, many of the other factors seem to magically fall into place. I am pretty sure it can also help hemorrhoids, even better than ice cream.
Twitter Changed, But it is Still Useful for SEO
Although I still really like Twitter, it changed a lot over time. Twitter had a huge growth spurt, and as the new users poured in, much of the real value of the service dwindled. It is still good for SEO, but what so many people do not grasp is that if you expect people to tweet and retweet what you have to share, it had better be pretty damn awesome to be heard over the excess noise.
How much did Twitter change? I could write another book about this, but I would rather stick needles in my eyes. I will just offer this: I wrote about Twitter retweets on February 29th, 2009. It was titled “Twitter: The Tweet About Retweet” and it received many hundreds of retweets. Tweetmeme says 420, but that data is old, and it was actually many more. In another case, I wrote a really short and basic article (approximately 250 words) about Twitter username selection on April 8th of 2009. It also received a ton of retweets and 158 reader comments. Back in the earlier days, I would measure between 500-1,500 clicks on darn near any link I tweeted, within minutes. Now, a hundredth of that would buzz my radar.
Maybe I just became less “brilliant” with the things people love to share, but I am pretty sure that is not the case. Many Twitter users just don’t see it when they are trying to follow a squillion other people, with hopes of being followed back.
Today, when I tweet something from my blog, I do not count on Twitter to pass it along. In fact, Twitter directly accounts for under three percent of my website traffic. Moreover, I have measured that the website traffic coming directly from Twitter has a low probability of participating and adding their comments to a topic. I think this is because of Twitter-enhanced attention disorders which were there before Twitter. Twitter just made it even more “old fashioned” to actually read things and pay attention. My study on this is forthcoming, but let’s just start the study with whether you will take the time to finish reading and add your comment.
Since the time of these popular Twitter-related articles, I have written hundreds of very compelling and useful blog articles which far exceeded the relatively minor value of those. I can effectively measure the value of Twitter from a conversational standpoint as much lower than it was. The SEO value of Twitter and the Twitter “retweet” is still there, but if you want to break through the noise, it better be something stunning.
“I do not rely on any single SEO tool too heavily, and I do not recommend that you do that, either. There is not a short list of SEO tools and tricks that will make you famously successful with search engines.”
If you came here about the ice cream, I am sorry about your bum. Perhaps you could try eating it really fast to take your mind off the ‘roids. If you came here about Twitter and SEO, please add your comments on my blog. Just type it in and let’s have a good old fashioned ice cream social.
You may say that marketing is not worth the time, effort, and monetary investment that others claim. Maybe it really isn’t what separates companies within an industry. It could just be luck which drives a company beyond their competitors’ boundaries and makes them successful in business. Maybe it is an awesome product at amazingly low cost supplied by a company that is willing to work hard while going broke. Yes, perhaps that is the real secret to success, and maybe the moon landing was a hoax, too.
The reasons for apprehension about marketing could be any of a squillion things which you can rationalize in your own mind, or it could simply be that you are scared to bankruptcy by the thought of putting a lot of money and hope into something you have pre-qualified as “doomed to fail”. Now, would you like to know why most marketing is doomed to fail, or would you rather just read another blog, buy another book, listen to another lecture, and follow what every other failed company that ever walked in your shoes did wrong?
I like to imagine that most companies would prefer to learn things without hastening failure, but I have been shocked before. In fact, I am shocked very often by things I learn while interviewing a prospective new client. Something I find most shocking is when smart people think that marketing is a matter of implementation, while strategy and planning go out the window. I hope you will have a little fun with this example I am about to spell out, because I will.
Oh No! Another Suture Hopeful
Sutures are those things that many people refer to as “stitches”. You know, like the kind you get when you bump your head and lose all of your logic.
I received an email message from the delighted VP of a surgical supply manufacturer a few weeks ago. He read and laughed his way to the bank about a story I wrote to exemplify an online marketing failure. He had every reason to love the story, because it was one of my best wrist-slaps of 2010 to a company that, in layman’s terms, “screwed the pooch”. You can say that it was an edgy move, but when this VP’s rival stiffed their marketing guy, they became an interesting study in just how bad a company can be represented online. I don’t go picking on companies indiscriminately, but I do carry a pretty big sword to wield against aggressors. In fact, this example has provided much amusement and joy to a whole lot of people in my industry.
The company who received my defensive wrist-slap was Suture Express. If you wonder why this rival surgical supply VP was delighted by my work, just perform a search on Google for Suture Express and read the first couple pages of results to find out how much love I gave them. They wanted search engine optimization, and they got it. In fact, they got enough search engine ranking that even the rival VP found me using a search for his own company name.
If Google deserves to be a verb to describe searching something online, then Suture Express has perhaps earned their place as a verb to describe companies who sabotage their online marketing hopes.
Anyway, this is not about Suture Express’ lies, or Suture Express CFO, Brian Forsythe. It is about having the guts to pull the trigger, and to understand that marketing is a huge factor in making or breaking a company.
I spoke with the amused surgical supply VP, and he was a joy to meet. He told me that he had a great laugh from my work, and that he could clearly see I know my career well. He also had a job for me to do.
The surgical supply manufacturer VP gave my name to one of his clients who wants to grow his online suture supply company and be more visible to people who buy sutures online. Since I rank right up there when people search for things like “order sutures online”, it seems pretty certain that I can help his client.
I received a call today, from the VP’s eager referral, and I was smacked with a snowball once again. Since I felt that the referral was pretty qualified, I spent some time on the phone with him. I liked him, too. I learned that he has five salaried field reps beating the streets and hitting the surgical centers and doctor’s offices, with some pretty impressive sales results at roughly a 40 percent closing ratio. It starts to sound like this guy has something that can be sold. He has technical studies to back up his products, and he is pretty enthusiastic about reaching the online market with it.
Slam on the brakes! He doesn’t have any goals, any budget, or anything more than a few basic statements to reflect why he even picked up the phone. He wants more people to know about his company, he wants more of them to come to his website, and he wants them to buy his products. It is simple, right? He lays all of his business hopes at the feet of a marketer, as so many people do, but he also wants it cheap. He would love to slide by paying a marketing guy less than he pays a sales rep, even when the rep has no sales. Yet, he wants to enjoy the branding and ongoing collateral that a marketing guy brings. That is pretty brilliant, except that it doesn’t jive. He wants what everybody else does, which is “the most bang for the buck”. Oh yes, but nix the buck part.
What I think he failed to realize, right off the bat, is that he is in a business that will go head to head with Suture Express. He knows the article I wrote explaining how his competitor spent $150,000 on a website and online marketing approach, and then called me to come and fix their mistakes. The article also explained that I turned down a lot of money to delete my story and sweep it under the rug.
With this information in-hand, he sent me the proposal his researcher gave him as the best alternative for their new online shopping cart, which was priced at $2,000. Are you kidding me?! Do people really hope to go to battle against a company who can buy and sell them with a bad day’s revenue, and do it without a real-life budget, or a plan? Worse yet, do they hope to do it with a plan that is comprised of nothing more than soliciting a marketing provider’s “off the cuff” proposal?
There is a lesson in this tale. If you don’t have a grasp on your market potential, don’t have quantifiable and achievable goals, and don’t have a solid and merit-based budget reflecting those goals, you need to pay somebody to do that research for you. Successful marketing does not come from shooting into the dark without a strategy. It is not the action of implementing ill-prepared tactics that a marketer suggests. Success requires research that experienced marketers are prepared to offer, but if you don’t have any of the basic groundwork, we get paid for that, too.
If you think that asking for a marketing proposal is how you will get the best research, think again. I can whip out a boilerplate marketing proposal that will keep you reading for hours, but it is not going to be anything more than a big number on a page if you are trying to get somewhere with your carriage pulling your horse.
I find that too many people think of marketing as simply an implementation of generic processes. If that is how you look at marketing, you may want to look again. You can search the Internet to buy sutures online, order sutures online, and an extensive list of other fancy search keywords like suture company, suture supply company, suture companies. You will find me very easily that way, and I don’t sell a single suture. To do that, it would take more than just a listing at the top of search engines and a lot of people talking about it.
Now, I ask you, does it look like I am writing a marketing proposal tonight? Oh, I guess you could call it that, but my proposal is this “Get serious, or go broke!”
