Internet Marketing for Small to Medium Sized Business Owners
Most business owners recognize the value of advertising as a means to bring new customers to their doorstep.
If you were to ask the average proprietor whether he or she had a listing in the Yellow Pages, the reply is likely to be,
"Obviously!"
Internet Marketing and Online Advertising, however, are relatively new terms to most people.
Advertisement itself is one of the oldest promotional techniques dating from the first efforts made toward commercial endeavors;
back to before the invention of the printing press, when merchants had no option but to announce the virtues of their goods and
services in a public borough. The concept of advertising on the Web via modern techniques is merely a decade old.
In light of these facts, it is unsurprising that many business owners remain unaware that budgeting for Internet Marketing when planning one's advertising campaigns is the best way to dramatically increase the Return on Investment on annual advertising spending.
The Yellow Pages had their time. Now we have the Internet.
People don't like to talk about it-- especially those who have already heavily invested in one or more listings in
"the book"-- but in today's age, it's more common by far for someone to open a new web browser tab and
Google for what they want than to hunt down the big yellow book, dig it out of whatever closet or cabinet it's buried in, rifle
through five hundred pages, and locate a listing in miniscule print.
We use Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo, Windows Live (formerly MSN) and Ask.com (formerly "Ask Jeeves") not
only to find local businesses, but also to determine which one is most reputable, which one has the best price, and even how to
get there. The world really has changed immensely over the last few decades; no question about it. When the methods by
which the common person looks for a provider of goods and services change, the methods by which you advertise
your goods and services must also change, if only to keep pace with those competing businesses that are forward-thinking.
In the modern era, small-to-medium sized businesses do not benefit from television, radio and Yellow Pages advertising mediums as
much as they might think. Most business owners would be surprised to know how many of their clients actually discovered them
through word of mouth rather than any of the places where they are spending immense amounts of marketing dollars. They'd also be
surprised to know how many clients found their competitors' businesses instead of theirs, just because of a good review on
a website perceived to be neutral territory, or because the competing business came first in the search engines!
While traditional advertising is still viable in some markets, it is undeniable that most next-generation professionals are
chained to one or more gadgets. Laptops, PDAs and cell phones keep us all connected, all the time.
Did you know that there are more Internet-connected devices than television sets worldwide?
When someone needs to find a company to provide services or products to fill their needs, they search the internet because it's convenient and easy. It doesn't cost money like 411 Information Services does, and it doesn't require nearly as much effort as the yellow pages do. It's almost as if each of us has been gifted with the power of an "information genie" in front of us, all the time, anywhere. We simply "make a wish", and we are immediately granted the information we desire.
Though you don't have to understand the technology driving all of these changes, it is vitally important that you have a team behind you that does. If you already have an in-house web developer, or a contractor that you go to regularly, ask them if they are familiar with the WWW Consortium (W3C), and W3C (x)HTML Compliance. Demand an answer straight-away; don't give them time to check it out on Wikipedia.
Ask them if they have heard of the United States Government's
Section 508 Accessibility standards,
or of the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
for people with disabilities. These regulations not only grant a broader and more diverse market access to your business online,
but are additionally quite useful in providing search engine crawlers with information about your site that they would not
otherwise be able to determine.
Chances are, your developer or website design firm doesn't even know these standards exist; even if they do, bear in mind that 95% of the web has yet to come into compliance with them.
Wondering whether your site is compliant or not? Start by running a
validation report on it.
Looking at your results, rememeber that all web browsers and search engine
site crawlers are designed based on these rules.
What that means for your business-- should any of the pages on your site have code errors-- is that while your site may look and act the way you want it to, at the same time it does not represent itself to the major search engines the way that they expect it to. Your site may be indexed improperly, or even not at all.
What good is a web page that nobody can find?Search Engine Marketing Info
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