Clicksharp Marketing

Sometimes there are business concepts germane to other functions–accounting, operations, sales, human resources–which shed light on the finer points of marketing.

In a recent episode of Internet Marketing Voodoo (one of the finer podcasts about our industry), host Paul Lewis borrows a term typically bandied about by finance professionals:

“You need to be thinking about your online investments as an annuity that is going to pay off over time — because they become a permanent part of the fabric of the online world.”

In other words, Lewis is telling business owners that the work we do to build up our profile online will always provide some kind of return.

Authoring blog posts, placing your business in local search, crafting a social media campaign, developing a promotional video on YouTube — these investments all require a certain up-front commitment of time and creative energy (though rarely a cash outlay). Over time, any or all of the following highly likely scenarios can result:

• People link to your content, helping your search engine rankings.
• Your brand comes alive and viewers are compelled to share with others
• Existing customers help validated prospective customers with feedback channels
• You pre-emptively answer questions, address concerns, dispel myths about your product
• More people adapt to emerging technologies, growing the base of your audience
• …and about a million other positive results.

So if you’ve ever hesitated generating content or fine-tuning your image online, chances are you considered the possibility of no return for your time and energy. But with several internet channels reaching near-ubiquity (email, search engines) and others growing very rapidly (blogs, video, dynamic maps, mobile ads), it’s almost impossible that your content won’t cross one of these channels sooner or later.

Or a hundred times an hour–because once you’ve gained the confidence in your annuity, the next objective to break the bank. Investing in keyword research, experimenting with social media, and optimizing ad conversion in paid search: these will only increase the payoff of that annuity over time…

This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 @ 7:04 am on the category Marketing Theory, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.


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