Navigating The Sea Change From Print To Online

The writing is on the wall for the print advertising industry. It’s been there for a long long time. Everyone knows that print marketing dollars are migrating to digital because that’s where the eyeballs are going, and with that come several challenges that all businesses must confront so they can make informed and intelligent decisions with their marketing dollars.

Even after having spent nearly seven years firmly in the online marketing space, dealing extensively with products aimed directly at small and medium sized businesses, I still find that the paradigm shifts are only slowly moving across the vast face of businesses at large. As quickly as the marketing field changes online, the pace of businesses figuring it all out moves equally slowly. This points to a sense that the transition from old traditional advertising models to new ones is not one of seamless grace. There is no easy hand off happening.

Part of the reason for this unsteady evolution is related to the sheer scale of eyeballs out there looking at ads in general, and where the looking is happening. Despite the mind numbing numbers of online users growing year over year, there is still a staggering number of people looking at printed pages that contain ads (even while those print viewing numbers continue to decline). Because of that, businesses must think long and hard before jumping ship on their long standing traditional advertising models. A simple example drawn from one of the most basic measures of advertising effectiveness serves this caution well: phone calls.

While it is not true for every business type, many industries will find that well executed online marketing strategies produce a more profitable cost per phone call, often far less expensive at a call to call comparison with print advertising dollars. A plumbing company, for example, might enjoy a $22 cost per call online, while spending $57 per call in print. Is the answer easy here? Should the plumber immediately pull out of print and pour all ad dollars into the Internet? This is where the sheer scale of eyeballs comes into play.

This hypothetical plumber could be generating 200 calls per month out of a print advertising campaign. Their online campaign might be generating 50 calls. The problem arises when the plumber wishes to replace those 200 $57 print calls in the online space. The fact is, there may not be enough searching eyeballs to support all the money the plumber would love to spend online getting cheaper calls. Especially pertinent for local businesses in an online search scenario, an advertiser will eventually run out of searchers who might see and click on an ad. This is not too dissimilar from the concept that there are only so many full page ads you can buy in the newspaper or phonebook before ad dollars becomes wasted. In the end, online advertising might only be able to generate 80 calls per month, far too few to keep this hypothetical plumber’s fleet of trucks on the street.

In these cases, businesses must work this enticing online lower costs per phone call into a realistic marketing measure. They must view their on and off line marketing dollars as a whole. Instead of trying to get all their calls for $22, our plumber must view all marketing avenues collectively and strive to get a blended overall average cost per call down to, perhaps, $45 through well balanced on and off line strategies.

Again, the shift away from print is happening, of this there is no doubt. But making the best use of all marketing media is a challenge that all businesses must face as the technology advancements work at a pace slightly different than that of the end users migrating from one medium to another.

Incorporating all marketing platforms into one concise overarching metric of profitability is a critical step of consideration for businesses as they strive to succeed with the marketing landscape changing beneath them.

You Are Not Your Website

Something you will do well to accept as you use the Internet to promote your business is that you are not defined by your website. In fact, a company’s website ranks well down the list when people rate what sources of content they use to build a trust level with a given product, or company.

Do you need a website? Yeah, probably. A website can be seen as the authoritative content benchmark for your company. It’s like a stable backbone from which a wealth of information springs, feeding the diverse avenues on the information highway. And it’s a resource for someone to best weed fact from fiction while they are out there gathering information from more trusted sources. In this day and age, every business needs a website. But it is critical to understand that a website is not a web presence, and your web presence defines you far more than your website ever will.

Frustrating? Sure it is. But when we start to see studies pointing out how social media, opinion sites, profile ratings, and the way people desire to see a company meet them in these venues all factor into the way we interact with companies online, there is no denying that a business (and even a person) must build a web presence even more so than a website.

Think of it like this: Your web presence is like a garden full of vegetables and flowers. It requires planting, watering, weeding, tending, and pruning in an ongoing cycle that is never dormant. You must pay attention to it, and constantly nurture and protect it. Your website, on the other hand, is like a statue or fountain placed in the garden. Far more stationary, it does what you want it to, and beyond occasionally repositioning and cleaning it, once you add it to the garden, your done.

When your company becomes present online, it provides as much the ability to get your message across as it allows you to receive messages. And, this bi-directional communication is vital to business success. When you effectively push out your marketing message, you will attract customers. When you listen to what people are saying to, and about you all over the web, you become open to many more things. You could solve a customer service nightmare before it actually happens, or gain insight into a new way your product or services could be developed to meet client needs. Listening is handy that way.

So, accept that being online happens on a continuum. You won’t succeed by building a site and saying you’ve made it online. Successfully being online is an ongoing, ever-evolving experience that requires your presence and persistence.

This Bus Runs From Monologue To Dialogue

So, imagine my delight while walking to work yesterday morning through downtown Chicago as I passed a CTA bus that had the living embodiment of Web 2.0 splashed across its advertising panel. I chuckled as I was struck by this non-Web example of the whole Social Media hubbub we see happening online. Forgetting that for the vast majority of my fellow commuters, this scene likely held nothing close to the same level of fascination – heck, I stopped to take a picture of the side of a CTA bus at 8:45 in the morning, something must be wrong with me – but this scene stopped me in my tracks. Defacing billboards is nothing new, but that someone with a black marker had transformed some unassuming ad text about a perfectly delicious hazelnut and chocolate bar (“driving you nuts”) into an engaging and somewhat witty open ended question regarding our city’s transit system resonated for me on many levels. “Is C.T.A. ‘driving you nuts’ ?” Classic.

At the deepest level, it touched me because I had spent all of my high school years riding CTA trains and buses every day to and from school, and many were the times that I could blame the CTA for getting me to school late. And at Lane Tech that meant Mr. Burns was going to give you a period of detention for being tardy. “But the bus…” It was a pointless argument. Yes, the CTA had driven me nuts plenty of times.

Tied into my current professional life that centers on web marketing and all this social media stuff, I couldn’t help wondering if the CTA was catching this mention of their brand. I couldn’t help but note how a person had engaged with an advertising message, striking up a dialogue – not even related to the advertiser itself, but with an entirely different, yet wholly present business entity – and while I reached for my phone’s camera, I wouldn’t be surprised if later in the day, someone reached for another marker to add an answer to the question now sitting on the side of a bus.

Like a blog post, forum question, or fan page, here was in interactive marketing experience, the evolution from monologue to dialogue. Here was a brand being taking to task. Here was an invitation to continue a conversation. Here was a “real world” example of precisely what we see going on in the current Internet experience. I found it at once comical, and poignant. And while it probably means far less to those uninterested in this online space, it’s probably something at least mildly interesting to you, a person who is right now taking the time to read a blog like this one at all.

As I continue to preach the lack of distinction between who you are, and who you are online (whether a person or a business), I wonder if this is life imitating art in some way, and if perhaps knowing which is which is becoming intriguingly more and more difficult to discern.

Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.

The SEO Genie

The world of SEO contains the seeds for a great modern age “genie in the lamp story.” A business owner is granted three wishes, and among them, one is squandered on the wish “to have my website rank number 1 on Google.” Granting the wish, the genie then waits, ready to shrug his shoulders when the business owner returns to complain that ranking number 1 in Google didn’t bring the expected riches. “Master, you never told me *what* you wanted to rank for on Google.” Ouch! Lesson learned. Who knew genies knew a thing or two about SEO?

In the “perfect world” for any business, all Internet traffic will come for free because their website ranks idyllically on page one of Google for all their important keyword phrases. However, the road to this utopian wonderland of web presence can be long, and sometimes it can careen up and down steep slopes veiled in thick fog, especially if you don’t really know what your “important keyword phrases” are.

Once you get over the false assumption that organic traffic is free – to do it really well, someone will have had to invest in solid SEO best practices, and that costs money, time, or both – you then need to confront the issue that “my website ranks at the top of Google” is an empty statement unless you know for exactly what terms it is ranking, and more importantly, that ranking for those terms matters in the slightest.

How can ranking number 1 in Google for something not matter in the slightest? Well, it won’t matter much if you are not seeing a tangible marketing return for that ranking. You might have a web page that ranks at the top of the engines for a particular keyword phrase, but if you aren’t making any money off of that ranking, do you care? You might have nothing more than an interesting conversation piece for your next cocktail party. “My business ranks number one for “XYZ.” I’ve never made any money off of it, but it’s pretty cool.”

When I talk to businesses, there’s a concept that consistently comes up which tends to catch them off guard: A good SEO will get you to rank for just about whatever you want. Given enough time (and investment), you’ll rank. But you’d better make sure it’s for something that means the most for your bottom line. Sometimes this concept doesn’t dawn on a business at all. So alluring is the Xanadu of Google ranking, they fail to tie it back to their marketing goals and dollars.

So how do you get to that point where you know what terms are worth all the SEO investment? You test. If you have not been studying your site metrics for years, you might do well to put your website through its paces with some aggressive Pay Per Click marketing. With PPC, you can rank for 10,000 keywords 15 minutes from now, and you can precisely measure the effectiveness of not only the dollars spent on those keywords driving traffic to your site, but your site’s ability to convert that traffic to a desired action too. Eventually you will learn which keywords lead to the desired action most cost effectively on a per page basis based on cold hard analytic facts. Those, then, are the keywords you go after organically. Whether you come to determine that PPC should be just an SEO investment tool, or perhaps a solid part of your online marketing initiatives can also be discovered through good Pay Per Click tactics.

At the end of the day, a single web page might be able to rank organically for a small handful of keyword variations. You owe it to yourself to figure out which keywords, out of hundreds and thousands, are the ones that bring you the highest return. Pay Per Click advertising can prove this out for you in a matter of months (or weeks sometimes, depending on how aggressively you drive traffic). Then you can go down the path of optimizing your web pages to rank naturally for just those keywords that you’ve proven are your money makers.

Don’t waste your time getting your web pages to rank number one in Google for keywords you *think* they should rank for. Take the time to figure out which keywords are worth that time. Then it won’t be wasted.