Media consumption
Consumers spend 6 hours per day online. Media consumption of traditional media sources such as TV, Print, Radio are all in decline.
- Think of your own experiences, how much do you watch TV today, vs. 10 years ago. Also, when the TV is on, what percent of the time are you truly engaged with the program and not looking at your phone?
- When is the last time you picked up a newspaper? Or if you have a newspaper, do you read it as often as you did 10, 5, or even 2 years ago? Probably not as you can can timely updated news just by picking up your phone.
For your business, always think of the end customer. Specifically, understand who they are, what are their needs, how can you give them value and, as it pertains to this post, understand where they are? Hint, they’re likely online and not reading the yellow pages or a local newspaper. If you’re not present where they are, how can you expect to reach them?
Woody Allen said this best in one of his famous quotes of “showing up is 80 percent of life”. Just the fact of being present will put your business in an advantage situation.
Let’s expand on this for a second.
Think of a local automotive shop in my hometown of Dedham, MA., Dedham Service Center. They have a site, provide great service at affordable rates, but they’re missing a key component, they’re not present. See below on a local search for oil changes in Dedham, MA. They cover all of the core aspects of the business, except they’re missing the most crucial points – they’re not present. Don’t worry, I’ll likely tap the owner of this shop to give him a tip that he should be present ;).
The good news is you can be present within one hour via Google Search advertising. See my previous blog post, here.
Digital is trackable
100% of your digital advertising for your small business can be measured and tracked to your return on investment. For example, an estate attorney might advertise their company to show up on three different search queries:
- Estate planning
- Create a will
- Family trust
In this example, the estate attorney will be able to see which keywords are driving business impact, through code we place on the site. For example, they may see that “Estate planning” drives a significant amount of leads, whereas “create a will” drives traffic to the website, but not leads. In this instance, they can pause advertising on users who search “create a will” and double down their efforts on “estate planning”.
Even better, eventually you’ll know the % of leads that turn into customers and of those customers, how much revenue (and potentially profit) they drive for your business. Once you have this, it becomes a simple math equation of how much you can spend per lead, to maximize profit. I’ll get into this much more later, but the bottom line is, digital is trackable and can be a strategic asset to drive business impact (i.e. more customers).
Digital is inexpensive
You may think that creating a digital advertising campaign, website, creative is super expensive, right? It sounds that way? It is if you want it to be. But if you don’t there are amazing resources available to do this on the fly. For example, my site only cost around $200. You don’t need much to get something off the ground. Now once you grow and have a lot of users visiting the site and want to further customize and optimize, sure that will cost more, but to start, it doesn’t take much. I even posted links to resources such as Fivver , where you can get digital assets and services on the cheap.
Digital is a great communication tool
Digital is a great way to tell your future customers what your business represents and how it can benefit them. On your website you can articulate all that you represent through a blog, examples of your work, services, pricing, etc. To boot, your customers can interact with you, whether directly on your site or social sites like Facebook and Instagram.
In no other time in history did small businesses have a platform to articulate what exactly they offer and how they will benefit their customers, at scale. Think about that for a second, 20 years ago – maybe you had a flyer in the mail, a brochure (both of which are expensive and most went in the trash) , and neither of them could get to the heart of what your business is with images, testimonials, success stories, videos, ability for customers to interact with your business, etc.
No more do we live in the time where it’s a one way communication, where you distribute information to your customers, rather it’s a two way dialog. Customers, and potential customers, will reach out to you, and you’ll respond. Thus building up rapport, and eventually loyalty. Think of digital as a tool to build relationships with your customers and potential customers of your business. The majority of businesses I partner with are a result of a prior relationship, whether it was strong or as little of knowing who they were. The key is there was a relationship which established credibility and ultimately led to me becoming a customer.
Where do you start in building a relationship??? Refer to the quote I listed earlier “showing up is 80 percent of life”, you have to be present to start a relationship. I think of this with my relationship with my wife, if I wasn’t present many many years ago at a house party in college where we met, we would have never had a relationship and ultimately marriage and family. Showing up is 80 percent of life :).
For those who are interested in being present to your future customers, let’s chat!
