Who’s helping you with your online marketing? Do they truly understand online marketing … or are they old school?
Increasingly we are talking with business owners that entrust their marketing strategy to a marketing director that simply doesn’t understand what they should be doing in the online world.
And that can be very expensive for your business.
Mike and Mary [I changed the names to keep things anonymous] are growing their company and recently hired a marketing director. He met with us to understand the concepts Mike and Mary already have in place, why their website was designed the way it was, and what he can do to move it forward.
His first complaint was the site was too wordy – way too much content, not enough images and catchy bullet points to sum up their concepts. His goal was to take away a lot of the content, and make it more presentation worthy.
And so the conversation began.
Old School methods involved quick marketing. The goal was to capture attention and pull them in to connect with you. And that worked well when you expected a client to pick up the phone and call you.
But in the online world, you rely on SEO tactics, keywording, social marketing and content marketing to be in the places you’re customers and prospects will most likely be.
(Yep, as expected, the wide-eyed stare began when terms like SEO, keywording and content marketing were mentioned.)
What should you be doing if you have an old school marketing director?
1. Hire a mentor. The online marketing world is still in its infancy – most of today’s working people remember when the Internet was introduced into their workplaces. As a mentor, we worked to ensure Mike and Mary’s new marketing director understands the importance of content and why he should be striving to create as much as possible.
2. Educate. Marketing is an ever-changing industry. Try, test, repeat … and learn something new along the way. If you’ve committed to have a marketing director on staff, make sure they are trained in every way to understand how to market to your clients in a variety of ways.
3. Get help when needed. While the marketing director should understand the overall strategy, they still might not have the time necessary to accomplish all of the tasks. Contract out and get the biggest bang for your bucks in the areas that are easily represented … just like we’re still ghost blogging for Mike and Mary to help them with their content marketing strategy.
And if you’ve ever been out on vacation and run into someone you know, again you realize what a small world it is. We were at Disney World in Florida a couple of years ago, and walked down the main stretch of Downtown Disney, only to walk right into a family we knew here from Denver but hadn’t seen in a few years.
