Imagine this scenario:
You just tossed up a brand new eCommerce website selling physical products. You spent a good amount of money developing it and it looks great. It was built by a developer who had SEO training, so you are pretty confident that it employs all the best practices. You’re selling a product with a reasonably high profit margin and you are all set to open your doors. At your first marketing meeting, you and your team sit down to decide where to spend your budget. Now, for the big questions! Where does it go? What are our best options?
Ok, you’re convinced, SEO and PPC. As your getting ready to finalize your budget breakdown, your marketing director, out of the blue, drops the bomb. “What about we take 80% of the SEO budget and spend it on social marketing?”…
Now, I don’t know how many of you remember the early “golden” years of the internet. I’m talking about back around 1998 when the web really was golden. Where all it took was a few weeks of time, a decent idea, and an e-mail account and you could set yourself up with a guaranteed cash flow pouring into your merchant account. Well, our business owner friend in that scenario, whether he knows it or not, was just proposed an opportunity that can certainly be compared to the “golden” days.
I have to admit, it took me a little bit of convincing to believe that social networking and other social media could really create such an incredible chance to grow a business. Don’t get me wrong, the idea that groups forming around specific topics and likeminded people coming together to share content, logically sounds like a perfect way to hone marketing to specific demographics. I mean, think back, when has there been such an easily accessible means of pushing your product or service in front of the eyes of potential customers who you know, without a doubt, are interested in some way? The need for convincing came when I had to think about sacrificing funding for other, more proven, marketing efforts.
So what did I do…. research…, well that’s not true, I had some of my team do the research, but the idea stands and let me tell you, I’ve had rocks hurled at my head that hit me with less force than what I was shown.
Let me give you a quick kick yourself….
- This year Facebook got almost as many page views as Google
- Myspace got more pageviews than Google for most of 2008
Alexa Graph
- YouTube has gotten up to almost a third more pageviews than Google per month.
Alexa Graph
(Reported by Alexa.com)
There are a good chunk of people who literally consider their social networking site of choice “the Internet”.
Whats more is…
- October of this year facebook had over 44 million unique visitors, which was an 80% increase over October 2007.
- Myspace was at just under 55 million and Youtube inceased their unique visitors 27% to a whopping 62 million per month.
(Reported by Compete.com)
We are talking HUGE numbers here. Imagine if the business owner in our scenario could capture just a percentage of that… I could go on for page after page shooting you statistics that could literally make your head swirl, So here’s my overall point. It can be argued that SEO has the potential to be the single most important marketing effort you could spend time on. Believe me, I am always a loud voice making that argument. It literally has the potential to grow your business into a “Powerhouse”.
But…
I’ll be blunt, Internet Marketing is drastically changing. That first ranking on Google is still a golden ticket, but within the last year and a half or so, for the first time, we have other options aside from Pay Per Click, or e-mail marketing.
If you know the correct strategies and tactics Social Marketing can give you direct access to huge groups of people who want to buy what you are selling, whether it’s a physical product, digital product, or even services.
It gives you the ability to gain massive amounts of pre-qualified traffic from sources other than the search engines or content networks.
It even can drastically speed up your SEO efforts, by flinging you out of the Google sandbox, and providing you the opportunity to get quality back links.
In general, Web 2.0 and social network really do provide you a theoretical “time machine” and give you some of the same opportunities we all miss from the good ol’ days of the net.
