With most things in life, there’s a balance we need to adhere to if we want to get a desired result. Marketing is no exception!
I was speaking with a motor mechanic yesterday, who explained to me the importance of balance in high performance cars. He said that many people will add a faster, more powerful engine to a car, but fail to upgrade the breaks and steering for all that additional speed and power. The end result is often a serious crash.
Business owners and entrepreneurs also need to be aware of the importance of balance, when it comes to their marketing. Otherwise, they too can see their efforts crash!
Marketing balance
For example, many people invest in great SEO and generate lots of targeted visitors to their website, but when these new people arrive, they are greeted with home-grown, pedestrian copy writing. In other words, all that SEO money is wasted because the messages that greet these new readers are not powerful enough to get them to take action. Equally, many well written commercial websites have very poor SEO and get very little traffic, so their message is seen by too few people to generate the volume of enquiries and sales they need. It’s all about balance.
Another common marketing imbalance, is the way people allocate their time. It’s not uncommon for some people to spend more time adding content to sites like Facebook and Linkedin etc, than they do developing THEIR OWN site or blog! I wrote last year about a guy who I saw adding content to Twitter every day, yet his blog had not been updated in 3 months.
Here’s a suggestion: Take a moment to review where you currently invest your marketing time and money and see if you can spot something, which is setting your results off balance. Here’s a very popular selection of marketing ideas, which you should take a look at, if you want a more balanced approach to your marketing.
Over to you!
What examples do you have of getting the balance right (or wrong) and what lessons you learned. Please share your experiences, with a comment.
Photo: Ky Olsen
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A common mistake with marketing activities I find is to disregard the broadening of your base. What I mean by that is that some businesses, once they find one particular source of new leads to be particularly successful just rely on that. However, we all know that one pillar make a particularly unstable base. For example, what happens if you’re doing really well with one particular SEO keyword phrase before Google pulls the carpet from under your feet by changing their algorithm? Improve your marketing balance by increasing the quantity of your successful marketing funnels!
Absolutely David. You seldom see an effectively marketed business, without 8/10 elements to their marketing mix.
Thanks for the feedback!
Jim,
Although we are across the pond and perhaps a little outside your immediate sphere the insights you have provided through your blog and social media posts have prompted me to have our marketing head subscribe to your rss feed. Your advice is valued – Thank you sir.
Dan Collins
Chief Operating Officer
AddVenture Products
Hi Dan. Thanks for the kind words sir.
By the way: I work with far more businesses in the USA than the UK.
Great point. I see this often with small business websites. They have a website, but it is not useful. They are directing people to visit a site that is either not professional or does nothing to close the deal.
With marketing, you need a process. It should be one marketing machine, working together to bring sales. I think we could all use a tune-up and rebalancing from time to time.
.-= Bradford Shimp´s last blog ..5 Quick Things to Do When Your Blog Has No Traffic =-.
As usual, a valuable and well thought out comment, Bradford! Thanks for the feedback.
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Hi Jim!
To me, your blog is one of the goldmines of the internet, so it’s not very often I feel the need to challenge your posts, but I must on this one, particularly because I could very easily be the subject of your “3 month old blog” comment!
I own up immediately to having had a Website holding page up for far longer than originally intended. Latterly that has been extended further due to my association with ProfileBuilder who
have what I believe to be a fabulous offer, whose time is now, and I’m now just waiting for mine to be installed!
In consequence, my twitter URL link leads to my blog, not my site, because it’s the (slightly!)more up to date!
My prime belief across the whole digital media spectrum is that people need to be able to find you & contact you if they are attracted to your offer and/or what you have to say. My main routes to the web are therefore SOCIAL media – Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn – rather than my website, because they are where I can interact with folks, which is what I enjoy doing, and what I enjoy preaching about too!
Focussing on putting businesses on the Map, the Web & the Shopping List is what I’m about, so I always feel the need to prove that they can have as much fun engaging with strangers, & making new friends, as I do. As you said in your previous post, people are really what the global village is all about! You also proved that it works, as it does for me, time & time again,
opening new routes to market & new sources of work.
So on the question of balance, it’s very true that a high performance car has to be finely tuned, but that won’t make it any better for riding cross country! A different kind of vehicle,
with a different kind of balance (including four wheel drive & new ride height) is required for that challenge.
Many of my thought leaders (you included) have made reference to the busy lives people have, the way this impacts on how they use the web, and that many don’t have the time to deal with content heavy sites anymore, unless they are actually hunting for academic tomes of course!
That leads to a change of balance, with more weight being given to being found and being “interactable” and thus greater use of social connections, with the website now being just one of the foundations of your “presence” online – it is no longer the rock everything else is built on.
I freely admit that I haven’t got it all right yet, (I don’t post to my blog daily like you do, for instance) but erring towards social is helping me get there!
Thanks Jim, keep ‘em coming!
.-= Howard Moorey´s last blog ..iPhone 3G + o2 Internet Tethering =-.
Thanks for the honest feedback, Howard. I would just like to add some clarity to a couple of points from my original post. I was not suggesting that people blog every day; I don’t blog daily myself and even if I did, it’s 100% NOT the right thing for most people. The point of the section of the post that you refer to, is simply that in my experience, many people spend a lot more time building material on other people’s outposts, rather than their own. However, please remember that the title of the post is all about striking the most effective “balance” for you – I think on that one we are in agreement?
When I speak to accountants I ask them where they are are spending their marketing time and money. They usually give a list including a Website, direct mail, telemarketing and advertising.
When I ask where their clients come from they say 99% from referrals.
When I ask how much money and time they invest in stimulating referrals by creating referrals systems they all say “none, it just sort of happens”
They soon get the picture and start to balance their budget between new and existing clients.
The web is full of tips and tricks on how to do Internet marketing.
Some methods work, others don’t.
You can’t know which marketing methods work until you’ve tried them yourself.
I’ve spent a lot of time on marketing techniques which proved to be completely useless.
In order to improve your “marketing balance”, you need to separate the useless marketing methods from the ones that give you results. You shouldn’t insist on inefficient marketing strategies. You need to recognize them as time wasters, and move on to other strategies.
With trial and error, you will eventually come up with marketing methods that are time-efficient. You need to focus on those methods in order to optimize your marketing agenda.
This might seem like common sense, but I find it is sometimes hard for us to accept the failure of a poor marketing strategy and recognize our mistakes, especially after having invested a lot of time and effort in that strategy.
.-= Phil B.´s last blog ..Will Epic Mickey induce the rebirth of an icon? =-.
This could be the same reason people will buy more stock as it falls in price rather than taking the hit and moving on.
What is key to investment is a balanced portfolio and the same can be said for marketing tactics and strategy.
Very good point! I often find with new clients that they have created a website that has either good design OR good SEO, but rarely do I see both. And that’s the balance you speak of.
Thanks, Suzanne