Internet Marketing Tools Future Course
I believe the future belongs not to the biggest or the strongest, but to those who are willing to adapt.
Over the past four years, my own efforts to help small business owners with their marketing efforts has become a living example of this belief.
Traditional Marketing Efforts
Initially When I started helping small business owners with their marketing four years ago, I employed the tools I personally used to grow my retail flooring business from $900,000 to $2.300,000. These tools involved:
- Building a solid marketing messages
- Applying the message consistently across marketing media
- Creating good yellow page ads
- Customer newsletters
- Customer Loyalty programs
- Add on selling and Up selling
- Joint partnerships with other businesses
Digital Marketing
Two years ago, I realized that we were in the middle of a paradigm shift. Lead by customers using the internet, small business owners needed to use the internet if they were going to be successful with their marketing efforts. While the core ingredients of creating a solid marketing message remained the same, there were new marketing tools.
- Websites
- Search engines optimizations
- Key word analysis
- Email Marketing
- On-line customer loyalty programs
- On-line joint ventures with other businesses
Today’s Social Media Sites
In the last six months, I recognized that small business owners must make even more adaptations. With the advent of social media sites, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and many other sites, the rules for successful small business marketing have again changed.
- Creating a brand presence on social media sites
- Learning how to interact with potential customers on line
- Using blogs, video, audio and text on line
- Learning how to promote with new marketing rules
I developed a free special report, A Small Business Blueprint for Social Media Marketing that you can access by completing the form in the upper right hand corner of this blog page. It’s free and provides a great framework for a small business owner on how they can use social media marketing for their businesses.
My intention six months ago with this Internet Marketing Tools Blog was to use the blog posts to dig deeper into the most popular social media sites. By reading, researching and writing, I hope to help small business with using these sites for their marketing efforts.
I started with Linkedin, a business orientated social media site. With the economic downturn and the record number of lost jobs, I took a small detour. I spent the last three months, exploring how Linkedin can help others find a job. This has been an exciting process. Linkedin has so many tools to aid people in their job search.
Beyond the research and posts I have made with Linkedin and job searching, I compiled those ideas together in a free e-book. (Currently being proof read). I will make that available as a free e-book in the next 2-3 weeks. It’s a small way that I can contribute to help others who are looking for work. (I will notify you how you can get a copy of this free e-book.)
Future Directions
Now I want to return to the original purpose of this blog and start on another social media site. I will start with Twitter since it has been in the news lately with the political developments in places like Iran and China. I will explore in more depth the purposes of Twitter, what it is and how it can be successfully used for small business marketing.
I hope this gives you insights into the adaptations I have made and the course I will be taking rmy blog for the immediate future.
To be continued, your comments are welcomed…
Al Hanzal
