What Stops Local Business Owners From Doing Internet Marketing
Some of the real heroes in the United States economy today are local business owners
. These are small businesses that employ people to do work right where they live. Many of them want to use the internet to market their business in the same way they have been marketing offline.
That does not work. Some of the concepts of marketing may be still apply, but how you utilize them has changed.
So why don't more small business owners figure out how to market in a local way? Here is what I am seeing so far.
1. They are too busy letting their business run them instead of running their business.
2. They have tried Internet marketing in the past and it has not worked for them.
3. They do not trust or believe marketing companies to do things online for them.
Let's look at each of these independently from each other.
Most small business owners have to work for a living. They are wearing so many hats that taking the time to learn how to do Internet marketing is out of the question. Their businesses are running them ragged 16 hours a day so where is the time to take on something more!
There is a pretty good chance that the sharp local business owner has tried, Google Adwords, or some form of search engine optimization with limited or poor results. They do not know why it didn't work for them, but their business did not grow enough to even cover the monthly costs of promoting it online.
Therefore they do not trust or believe it when someone has a great idea to market online for them for a fee. Can you blame them?
The problem is if you are taking the approach of just treading water and not marketing online with a full steam ahead attitude you are going to get buried. If you are in a local market with any number of competitors you may as well plan on losing market share every year.
Not only will you not grow, you are going to slip. Maybe only a little bit today, but I dread to think where you will be in 5 years.
You have 3 choices!
1. Become educated on effective Internet marketing.
2. Put someone in your company in charge of learning how to market online.
3. Outsource it to somebody to do it for you.
Putting it off any longer is a recipe for failure and you can look in the mirror 5 years for now and see why! Strong words for sure, but then the Internet is only just getting going in local business marketing and you can get on board now or fall way behind later.