42-15928058

To every small business owner, I’d like to check your pulse. I want to know if you’re still in the game, if there’s still life left in you.

Mainly because I’m concerned with the way marketing is changing. What once was, is no more and cannot be handled as such.

I regularly have discussions with small business owners because it’s a market I consider to be my playground. It’s my territory, and working with small business owners is where I thrive. I commonly run into businesses that have little to no presence on the web with no plans to change that. Often, one of the first questions I ask is why the business had adopted the strategy that they use. I often get a number of things noted to me in return that play a part in their online presence (or lack thereof):

1. Their demographic doesn’t involve young kids and teenagers or stay-at-home parents who putz around on Facebook. They want people who have additional income to spend, and in their eyes those people don’t spend their day lounging online

2. They have success with their direct mail campaigns (flyers, magnets, post cards, letters) that they typically design themselves. I marvel at the instability of the business and wonder what their definition of “success” is. Mine seems to be quite different

3. They often have a website that was designed by a friend, family member, by themselves or it was designed by a local “designer” with an at home “web design” business. The sites tend to leave a lot to be desired, aren’t optimized in any form and more often than not I’m told that they don’t change or update it because they either can’t afford to do so or they don’t want to hurt the feelings of the person who designed it.

4. For those that performed some measure of research and contacted companies for marketing, they were frustrated that they could not receive quantifiable returns on the investment. They want to be told that business will increase by X amount of dollars over a specific period and it’s something that couldn’t be substantiated. Because of that, they backed out.

5. They just don’t understand “it”. Because they don’t understand social media marketing and location based marketing online so they simply do not participate or attempt to do so. It’s not for them.

Without being crass or lacking in compassion, I have to be blunt. These business owners are likely going to sink and go out of business. Cash flow will continue to be choked off by the raging social media marketing campaigns of competitors and the customer base will continue to shrink each day.

To answer the shrinkage and forced price reductions to get people in the door they turn to the same methods – direct mail, bigger yellow page ads, radio spots. They’re attempting to run their business in the new millennium, in 2010, like it’s still 1983.

This is where my compassion presses me forward because situations like this frustrate me. It is the actions of the business owner that brought them to this point. Their lack of social media marketing and online presence is causing them to lose their customer base. It has less to do with the economy than many people think.

The world of online marketing is a new and mystifying place to someone who doesn’t understand the nature of the creature but business owners have to stop turning a blind eye to the things they don’t understand. They should instead be seen as opportunities to break ground and put a positive change into affect. For those companies willing to surge forward and discover how social media marketing can aid their business, they gain traction from competition that is paralyzed with the fear of the unknown. Because of the lack of action among their competitors, they’re able to dominate the market share and have growth even in a stale economy.

Where do you see yourself and your small business in 2010? Where do you want to see yourself by 2011?

Are you still hanging on?

Spread the love ... Re-tweet this content.


Outsource Your Marketing in Minutes to Hundreds Worldwide... Click Here >>>

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. You may also follow my updates on Twitter.