This funny video by Hubspot personifies Inbound Marketing (SEO and PPC) vs. Outbound Marketing (cold calling and telemarketing). Did you laugh?
Sure it's a rip off of the "Hello I'm a Mac and I'm a PC" television ads, but the message is true. Customers no longer need to be accosted to learn about your product or services. There's a reason the Do Not Call Registry exists!
If people want your product or service, they will contact you. How will they find you? Look around. It's hard to not find somebody more than 6 feet away from a notebook computer, desktop PC, BlackBerry, iPhone or iPod. When they're not watching people dancing on YouTube, they're searching the web. Let's hope they can find you!
A total stranger exposed herself to me recently. It happened after a shopping trip to my local super-value-mega-warehouse-club store. All I wanted to do was buy a phone, but I got so much more.
I have a picture of her exposing herself to me. I though you might want to see it too...
The explanation is that I bought this new phone at the store. I brought it home and thought, "I want to try my new phone". I plugged it in.... so far, so good. Then things got wierd.
Even before it was connected to the wall a computerized voice announced, "YOU HAVE NINE NEW VOICEMAILS". I thought, "Hmmm... my new phone is psycic. Let's hear these phantom voicemails". I clicked play and listened.... Message 1
"Hey Sherri, it's your sister Patty, I just wanted to call and say happy birthday! I miss you! Call me soon."
Message 2
"Hey Sherri, It's your brother Walt. Happy Birthday! I hope you are having a great day. By the way. I wanted you to know that since you come over so often anyway, I am leaving a house key for you under the plant on our porch. No we won't have to go through what we went through last week again. Call me later! Bye."
Message 3
"Mrs. Johnson, this is Dr. Green's office. He asked me to call and let you know that he has called your prescription into the CVS in Coventry. You can pick it up anytime you like. If you have any questions give us a call. Thanks."
I listened and listened for about 10 minutes. By the time the messages were all played, I had heard from her two sisters, mom, brother, doctor, husband, and one of her kid's school teachers. Of course, like you, I now knew that I had purchased a phone that had been previously returned. So, after deleting the messages I started trying to erase all other evidence of Mrs. Johnson; I checked the caller ID on the phone.
Not surprisingly, there were about 20 caller ID's listed. All of the names and phone numbers of the people that had left messages were there as well as one attorney, citizens bank, and a bunch of blocked calls. That is when it hit me. I had bought a phone AND thiswoman's identity.
I now had:
Her full name
Her closest relative's names and phone numbers
Her birthday
Her doctor's name
Her husband's name
Her kid's name
I knew where she banked
I knew where she filled prescriptions
I also knew where to find a key to her brother house and that he obviously isn't home much!
A quick superpages search gave me her address, and a Google search showed that her husband runs his own business in East Greenwich. On top of it, Google even offered to sell me a criminal record search on her for $40 (a small investment when you realize that this will most likely return her SSN).
By now, the moral of the story should be clear. We all use portable electronic devices, and we all potentially expose a huge amount of personal data every day.
Are your flash drives and memory sticks encrypted?
Do you protect your email account password?
When you log into your email from a cafe, hotel, or at Starbucks are you careful to actually LOG OFF rather than just closing the browser window?
Do you shred your mail before disposing of it?
What if you lose your cell phone, what information could someone get about you even if you cancel the service?
Identity protection is about more than not giving out your social security number. Think carefully about how you expose yourself. You may not be as lucky as Mrs. Johnson was. I am not a crook, and in fact, I even changed her name in this article just in case.
From her point of view, all she wanted to do was exchange a phone. Fairly simple huh? Unfortunately, by not thinking, she really rolled the dice. I wasn't the only one buying phones that day.... and the guy standing next to me looked a little sketchy :)
So I was walking the streets of New York City a week or so ago when I saw a massive ‘Going Out Of Business’ sign emblazoned on the storefront of a 5th avenue art/antiques shop. Ten minutes later I saw a similar sign, followed by a third one a short time after that. Three gigantic billboard-like reminders that the economy is hemorrhaging right now. Granted, this is a bit misleading since these stores are actually named 'Going Out Of Business' (targeting tourists looking for a closeout-type deal no doubt), but the huge sign still made me think about where we are right now and wonder how long before stores need to put signs like this up not because they have strategically decided to name their company this, but because they really are going out of business.
The state of our economy is probably not news to anyone who lives here in the real world with the rest of us. You can’t turn on the TV or the radio or visit any news Web site without being assaulted with headlines that run the gamut from alarming to downright terrifying. Many companies are finding it difficult to conduct ‘business as usual’ as credit becomes nearly impossible to come by for their own business as well as for their customers. It’s a vicious cycle as consumers are spending less, which mean businesses are making less – a fact that compounds the problem of not being able to get credit in the first place.
In times such as this, marketing budgets are typically one of the first things that businesses cut. That doesn’t make any sense to me and quite frankly it seems counter-productive to surviving in this type of an economy.
Consumers are looking for your business…are they finding it?
Let’s start with consumers. A down economy obviously affects consumers and how they spend their money – but they ARE still spending money. Belts may be tightening, but consumers (and I am including other businesses when I say ‘consumers’) still have necessities and they must spend at least some money to acquire those necessities. What has changed in this economic climate is how willing consumers are to shop around and find different companies to get those necessities from.
In good economic times, many buyers are unlikely to search for new service providers so long as they are content with the ones they have. Notice that I didn’t say ‘happy with the ones they have’, I said ‘content with the ones they have’. They may be aware that there are better prices out there and even better overall services, but the hassle of finding a new provider, making the switch, and changing their lives or businesses, even in a small way, to accommodate this new relationship keeps them from shopping around for alternatives. As long as the services or products they are currently using aren’t bad or grossly overpriced, odds are they’ll keep the status quo. In a down market, however, this changes as consumers look for better prices or, at the very least, more value for their dollars. This means that business that may have been closed to you in a good market is suddenly within your reach, but you need to realize this opportunity and act upon it to attract this new business.
As I said earlier, your initial reaction in challenging times like these, like most, is to scale back on advertising to save money. Your competition likely has made the same decision, cutting back their own ad dollars. But while that may save you money now, it is costing you business both today and in the future!
There are buyers out there who are actively in need of your company’s services, buyers who are shopping around looking for better prices, better services or better values. They are looking for YOU, but you’re not in front of them because you have scaled back on your advertising! So who gets that new business? Those companies who see this as an opportunity to expand their reach and attract new customers through carefully selected advertising channels, specifically those that funnel users directly to their Web site.
Investing in your Web site makes the difference.
Investing in your Web site is one way that you can survive in the current market conditions by actually increasing your customer base, putting yourself in even better shape for when the tide turns and the market rebounds.
When I say ‘investing in your Web site’ I am referring specifically two areas:
The methods used to drive visitors to your site. We call this ‘Online Traffic Generation’ and it includes search engine optimization, Internet marketing, online community building and more.
The effectiveness of the site itself. Getting users to your site is a big part of the equation, but we also need to be sure that when they get there, the site meets their needs and reinforces the goals of your business.
In July of this year (2008), Web users made 12,000,000,000 (twelve billion) search requests using Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines. That’s all searches combined, so let’s look at a more specific, targeted search like ‘realtors’. The real estate market has been one of the hardest hit by this economic crisis, but in July there were still 16.6 million searches done for that one term alone. While that number of searches is undoubtedly lower than the same time last year, that’s still a large number of queries from consumers looking for that certain service. Even a market like real estate that has been hit hard in these times can benefit from investing in their site. If they can grab even a small percentage of those 16.6 million searches they are going to see some positive results in their business coming from the increased traffic to their site. Companies that have invested in their Web sites and their online traffic generation strategies and are positioned well within search engines will directly benefit from those strategies as consumers shop around looking to stretch their budgets and explore their options.
Practicing What We Preach
We’ve realized this opportunity here at Envision and have recently invested heavily in our own Web site and marketing efforts. In addition to updating our branding and marketing materials, in the past few weeks we have launched a brand new version of our site, making sure that it focuses on the key solutions that we offer and provides clear, compelling content for our users (like our Blog!). We’ve also continued to look at our online traffic generation campaigns and our online community building efforts (which this blog is a part of). Ultimately, we have taken this time to focus on the items I have listed above: how we drive people to our site and what we present to them once they are there. We’ve made these investments because we know that the customers are out there and now is a great time to be in front of them.
Times are tough, there’s no denying that, and I am not advocating a haphazard approach to spending your marketing dollars – that will not work in any economy! I am suggesting a measured approach that evaluates your Web site and the traffic generation methods used to drive users to it, realizing that this approach can help you gain customers and increase business even in today’s economic landscape. And when the market rebounds and business picks up, you’ll have increased your customer base and be in a better position than you were before the crisis.
So what kind of sign are you going to hang outside your business? One that declares the end of operations, or are you going to do what we’ve done at Envision – invest in your site and hang a different sign out front, one that says ‘Open For Business’.
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