If you’re new to digital marketing or internet marketing, getting started can be a bit overwhelming. The fact is, you don’t have a choice regarding how you need to market your business going forward. Your new customer acquisition strategy must take into account the habits of the customers you’re trying to acquire. Almost everyone uses Google to find what they are looking for AND spend a lot of time on Facebook.
So, given these two FACTS, I thought I’d write about some immutable internet marketing laws.
You STILL Get what you pay for – Google makes it really easy to set up a Google Adwords (paid search accounts), but they don’t guarantee success. As a matter of fact, many people have spent (wasted) thousands, trying to implement one of these campaigns. SEO professionals abound and offer magical SEO pixie dust to get to listed on the first page of Google. There are hundreds of companies that build websites. You can even buy one from Intuit for $14 per month!
You CAN spend time trying to coordinate all these services, but remember, you get what you pay for. Internet marketing is not easy and it keeps evolving. It’s hard enough for Astonish to stay up to date with the latest techniques (and that ALL we do).
Internet Marketing involves constant testing and experimentation.
Why? The internet is a fluid environment.
If you check out domaintools.com, you can find out how many new domains where registered in the past 24 hours. Whe I checked there were a total of 100,868 domains registered in the past 24 hours!
Since you are marketing in such a fluid environment, there are tons of variables (audience, geography, product, seasonality effects, website and competition). Now I just mentioned six variables, there are many more. Obviously the more variables involved the more complex the solution.
You cannot expect what you tried last month is going to produce the same results. Take SEO for example. Even the choice of keywords is a test. Google is not going to tell you which keywords to focus on. Say you’ve picked the best SEO team in the world to optimize your site. Let’s say you picked Bruce Clay. After you’ve slapped down $15K (yes that’s what they charge), and your site is optimized, Google could change their algorithm or a competitor could come into the space and you’re cooked.
Does that mean you shouldn’t try or that it’s hopeless? No. You don’t have a choice. If something doesn’t work as expected, get used to it. Learn from it and move on.