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Where’s 5% of Your Revenue Going?

Do you have a business colleague who is worried about gaining more customers?  Most of us can relate; no matter how good last month, last quarter or last year was, savvy business leaders recall the advice, “what made you successful in the past won’t in the future.”  (Lew Platt, former CEO of HP).

It’s common for a business plan to allocate 5% of revenue for marketing.  Many industry verticals are more than double the 5%, some B2B verticals are slightly lower.  The point is there is a need to maximize the effectiveness of your marketing spend – and the way to do this keeps evolving.

Whether you are marketing via traditional advertising, doing online marketing with an SEO or paid search program, or going to trade shows, you know the need to do something to generate revenue.

As much as we promote the value of SEO because when done well SEO is very impactful, our message today is that “it all works together.”   The marketing mix:  Offline marketing such as TV or direct mail, online marketing including SEO, paid search and email.  It all works together.

You intuitively know that your marketing message and your sales people are best when they are telling a story.   Such storytelling is likely what made you successful, and if you follow marketing trends, you’ve read how taglines and jingles are giving way to ‘telling a good story.’

Now your challenge is to get your story out — how to distribute it.  Our friend Tina McKenna said, “TV brings emotion that a display ad can’t do as well.”  Think kids and puppies. Think old Kodak and ATT ads. When you think about how much of our purchase decision is based on emotion instead of logic, you realize Tina is right.  If you’ve been in love, you know how impactful emotion is.

Creating video is a solution for top SEO programs by putting 30-second, 60-second and other short videos on your website.  And as Tina added, “if you want to cover a local market like Atlanta, TV isn’t necessarily out of reach.  Options include cable and satellite TV customers and/or broadcast station TV viewers.”

One of the things we like about Tina and the remaining sales reps for traditional media outlets is that they without hesitation talk about integrating a traditional media purchase with online:  landing page(s), an SEO program, and paid search like Google AdWords.  They are finding that traditional media gets awareness and some needed repetition of the message.  That awareness generates online traffic as buyers want to validate what they saw on TV with what they see online, or to learn more — checking out your website and review sites.    And all that checking out further helps your SEO program.

If your online presence, including your organic page rank pushed by an SEO program, and reviews — which is also part of an SEO program — match your TV ad’s message, your prospective customers are more likely to proceed with buying from you.

We encourage the use of video as part of your marketing mix to tell your story while staying within your 5%. Video can be as simple as you talking to a camera and placing the video on your Home page or About Us page.  It can be a product demo on your website’s Services pages.  Or it can be a 30- or 60-second broadcast TV ad.  In all cases, video is a great communicator.

If you have considered video, we invite you to speak with a NicheLabs account director about the benefits and methods of creating and displaying your emotion-conveying storytelling.  Or we can talk about top SEO programs, paid search programs, social media, email, and, of course, website design.  As always, we love talking marketing strategy and tactics.  Give us a call at 888-978-9254 or send us an email using our website contact form.