I spent the day at the Online Marketing Summit (OMS) in Portland Tuesday. Like most of these events, there was a lot of repeated information about the status of Search Engine Marketing, organic optimization, Pay-per-Click, and social media – but I usually get out with a couple new takeaways.
The conference featured sessions on website strategy, web analytics strategy, Email marketing, loyalty marketing, and a couple of social media marketing panels; each given by a speaker known for their successes in their respective fields.
One of the more interesting concepts came out of the opening keynote, where the founder of OMS explained the dangers of hitting the snooze button in business.
He compared it to how most of us wake up in the morning. The alarm goes off. We wake up just enough to reach over and hit the snooze button. A few minutes later the alarm goes off again. Again, we reach over and hit the button. A few minutes go by and the alarm goes off a third time. Some of us will finally get up – while others look at the time and sleepily come to the irrational conclusion that we can sleep for another 5 minutes and somehow still make it to work on time. Wrong. You get up, rush out the door, drive to work in a panic, and show up 10 minutes late.
Well, as he pointed out, businesses are often guilty of the same thing. We wait and wait, even though the alarm of change is ringing in our ears, we put it off. We say, “I already have a website – so I’m covered”. Or, “we paid someone to do Pay-per-Click, so we don’t need that organic stuff”. Whatever it is, they’re hitting the snooze button over and over. Until one day they realize they need to jump on this. You know where I’m going with this, don’t you? When they finally “wake up”, they’re in a mad dash to catch up with those that already moved forward. Being “late”, they’ve caused themselves extra pains – as they’ve allowed competitors to creep up and take an advantageous position online.
I couldn’t stop nodding my head through this 10-minute rant from the guy on stage. I see this every day. I see it in the glass industry now – but I saw it in many other verticals in my agency life. There’s just no sense of urgency!
If only I could pull the strings and make you all do what I’ve been recommending. But sadly, I must sit by idly, helping those that realize its needed, and feeling sorry for those that keep hitting the snooze button.
Just something to think about.
And in case you were wondering… here are some new stats on the top sales influencers from across the nation:
Internet 39%
TV 18%
Radio 12%
Magazine 3%
Newspaper 2%
I’ll share the source of this data as soon as I can download the presentation from the conference.
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2 comments:
Scott,
Would you tend to agree or disagree that a business that only targets local people, target in their organic search local key words that are relavant to their local area? Such as if i was a small auto glass business in Charlotte, NC I would have more of an interest in having charlotte auto glass, etc that would drive a town key word to my site? If your yournamehere.com and you do not do business in lets say alaska or missouri, would you not be wasting band width by having people in alaska click on your web site for a organic search on auto glass than a key word of perhaps auto glass alaska ?
Thanks,
FixMyWindsheild.com
You're right on for a local focus. There's no use in getting traffic from anywhere outside of your target area. Of course, some may debate "target area" - like building a brand in an area that you plan to expand into. But that's an entirely different campaign.
One thing to keep in mind; not everyone types in the local descriptor. Many potential customers in your area will simply type in ‘auto glass repair’ and not append any local term (city, etc), yet you’d still like to get traffic from these folks; but how?
Okay. I’ve just completed a much lengthier response to your question/comment, and realized it would make for a better post than comment. Check out my next post on Local Optimization for more details – hopefully up by end of day today.
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