Internet Marketing Is Not As Easy As It Sounds

The internet is a great market for any business but getting started can be difficult. It all comes down to properly marketing your business online. Internet marketing sounds simple enough that many people attempt to do it themselves, but honestly, it takes a wide variety of skills that most people do not possess. Internet marketing has a proven positive effect on a company’s sales, but is it worth paying for?

Trying To Do It Yourself

Attempting to do internet marketing alone is a risky gamble. Here are a few examples of why do-it-yourself internet marketing usually fails.

  Not setting aside enough time and money

The internet is a growing organism that changes daily. You must keep up to date with current online trends or risk losing business. Customers you had today are literally a click away from shopping somewhere else.

For a growing business, 90% of the time away from customers must be spent marketing.  At least 60% of the total marketing should focus on the internet.

You must also hire new staff to handle marketing issues.  You must budget this new staff too:

• Do in-house graphic design.
• Research, maintain, create, and monitor all marketing campaigns for effectiveness.
• Create online videos for your company.
• Use social media sites to generate leads.
• Write blogs or press releases, and submit them to the correct websites.
• Analyze website stats and optimize web content for searches.

These are not one-time fees, but an ongoing process. Once you create an internet marketing staff it may shrink after the business grows, but it will never fully disappear from your budget.

  Lack of training

Companies who think they can do it themselves without hiring staff often do not realize the amount of skill it takes to properly market online. A couple of posts to a Facebook or Twitter page simply isn’t good enough. You must have technical skills that many people pursue college degrees to learn.

Necessary skills:

• Website design – Many programs are available to create websites, but these often look generic or bland. If your website is too bland or if it has a bad flow people will not trust or even take the time to fully view the content.
• Professional writing skills – All of your articles for products or advertisements have to be well written. They need good, relevant information presented in an easy-to-follow format. A good article can take more than 30 minutes to research and an hour to write.
• Computer programming skills – HTML, Java, C#, C++, SQL, and a variety of others require very precise training which many people do not have.
• Full marketing – Knowledge of how to set up Pay-Per-Click Campaigns, Media bus, and Search engine optimization.

Learning these skills can take many years. If you are going to do it yourself you will either have to study all of these skills and more or hire new staff.

Limited point-of-view or bias toward your product

It takes a long time to generate fresh marketing ideas, especially when dealing with your own product. Many people automatically assume that others know about what makes their product the best. This type of bias limits the effect of internet marketing.

To have an effective marketing campaign you must look at it from multiple perspectives. To accomplish these many companies have to look towards outside groups, even if only on a consulting basis. This is just one more cost of doing it yourself.

Hiring Someone To Do It

In most companies’ experience, it is actually cheaper and more effective to pay for an outside group to do their internet marketing.  It has been said that telling an internet marketing specialist you can do it yourself is equivalent to telling a dentist you can pull your own teeth.

Good internet marketing is essential for your company to grow. Contact us with any questions!