Business Strategy

Good Day

I’m putting together a marketing first-aid kit for small businesses to use when they need to bring in sales from their past and current customers. While gathering the many items and media for the first-aid kit, I remembered a principle I learned: A business should not be dependent on just one medium to market and promote itself.

A few years ago, Google changed their algorithm, and a lot of businesses lost their rankings and money. Facebook changes things all the time that affect businesses’ income. Not so long ago faxing was big, but then the law was changed; the same goes for telemarketing consumers. I know of businesses whose whole advertising strategy was based on faxing or telemarketing that are no longer in business because of those changes.

As a savvy marketing colleague has told me many times, “the worst number in business is one.” Now people are very dependent on social media and they count Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., as three, five or more media. It’s all the same medium! If you are overly dependent on any one (networking, radio, social media, yellow pages) you are overly vulnerable. You and your business are at enormous risk.

Overdependence puts you in peril. The only strategy that is safe is a multimedia marketing and sales strategy. Ideally you should have no more than 20% of your leads and sales come from any one medium.

Until next week,