Your Marketing Wakeup Call

Times are chang­ing. I read another arti­cle today that by the end of the year The New York Times will cut 100 news­room posi­tions. I write for About.com, which is a com­pany owned by The New York Times, so this news sad­dened me.

I’m for­tu­nate that I started in the online indus­try in 1997. As such, I’ve always adopted new media eas­ily, but I think it’s because that’s where I began my career.

I’ve met with gen­eral man­agers of news­pa­pers, edi­tors and writ­ers — our dis­cus­sions always end up around the lack of adop­tion of new media when it was intro­duced by tra­di­tional news­pa­pers. Unfor­tu­nately, those same news­pa­pers are feel­ing the pinch dur­ing this time.

I’m not say­ing that tra­di­tional media is a dead-end, but let’s think about it. When was the last time you went out into the dri­ve­way to pick up your daily news­pa­per? When was the last time you pulled out the yel­low pages to look up a tele­phone number?

We all knew that the Inter­net would change our daily lives — some of us slow to adopt, but now we can’t imag­ine liv­ing with­out it. There are many peo­ple who could han­dle a cable out­age eas­ier than an Inter­net out­age. Need proof? Turn off your com­puter for 24 hours — cut off your access to the Inter­net. Did you just have a panic attack think­ing about it? I did.

I find it amaz­ing that com­pa­nies still often depend upon the tra­di­tional means of mar­ket­ing and look at the new media options as alter­na­tives. They will pay more for a one time adver­tise­ment in a mag­a­zine than they will on their web­site design. They will seek out a radio spot before mea­sur­ing the impact social media could have on their busi­ness. Do you see my point?

Put your busi­ness into check.

• How is your web­site? Does it reflect your busi­ness accu­rately? What mes­sage does it reflect when it comes to professionalism?
• Are you writ­ing a blog and inter­act­ing with poten­tial cus­tomers or is your web­site sta­tic and dull?
• Are you doing search engine mar­ket­ing? How are you rank­ing when cus­tomers type in key­words? Are you show­ing up?
• What about social media? Have you dipped your toe in the water? If for no other rea­son than to mon­i­tor your online rep­u­ta­tion and pro­tect your brand?

Don’t aban­don the tra­di­tional vehi­cles of mar­ket­ing, but be sure to inte­grate it with online mar­ket­ing and new media options; oth­er­wise you may end up strug­gling like the news­pa­pers are today.

Tagged as: internet marketing, marketing methods, online marketing, social media marketing