subject: Social Media and Online Marketing - A Word of Caution (NNOS Studios of Ohio) [print this page] Social Media and Online Marketing - A Word of Caution (NNOS Studios of Ohio)
If you don't know how to drive a car don't get in the driver's seat. Now, we know you won't accept the fact that you can't drive, and you'll figure you'll try because you're confident that you can figure it out. Whatever. That's fine but stay away from real roads and streets until you get some basic training. Otherwise you'll get messed up. Big time. In the process, you'll ruin your chances and by making yourself look bad, you'll make every one else look that much better than you.
K. What's this all about?
It's about social media marketing. Well, online marketing in general. You now have the example of the car and driver. Likewise, if you don't know how to market, don't get behind a keyboard and try to figure it out. Actually, if you're not super savvy online and a natural marketer, you'll waste your time if you try. Not saying you can't figure it out eventually...just saying that you don't have "parking lots" where you can practice "driving" when you're dealing with online marketing.
Two things:
1. Putting your business online will greatly amplify your offline results. If your business is not so great offline, it will flat out SUCK when it's online.
2. Because of the internet and this online/social media marketing era, business today moves so fast that you don't have time to figure out what you don't know.
By the time you learn what you don't know about the marketing world today, those strategies will have long expired and new ones will have developed. But that only brings us back to the bare principles of building a successful business: you build a successful business by getting people in there who are better than you at your own job - getting people who play at what you work at. They'll do it twice as good, twice as fast.
What I commonly run into as a business consultant and marketing strategist, is people trying to read up on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin marketing strategies; going to seminars; trying to learn about SEO, etc. all for the sake of trying to learn how to do it themselves so they don't have to pay someone to do it. That's fine and dandy. Except it'll never work right. Watch this: you make one mistake in an article, and ad, a video, PPC, or some other guru promoted form of online marketing, and you just put a big split in your reputation. Or if you have no online presence, you just went below zero in your POTENTIAL reputation.
But that's not even the really bad part.
The worst part is that you've created a self-generating loop for that reputation because your mistake just made everybody else in your industry look that much better. And it's not bad to make others look good - in fact that is a great thing for business. The problem is that you just made them look that much better THAN YOU! And you did it with your own content. Mistakes like these are close to unforgivable in business. You have one chance at a first impression.
That's just one point. Then comes into play how deep you get into marketing. People buy based on emotion and then justify it logically. Emotional response marketing. Colors. Interrupting. Engaging. Educating. And only then offering. USP's. The list goes on.
And you have only your potential to pursue. While change is inevitable...growth is a choice.
