When bad weather hits, we are always looking for someone to blame for the impassable roads – the local council doesn’t have enough salt or the central government has acted with inadequate fervour to overcome our frosty difficulties.
The same happens in a downturn when our businesses don’t live up to our expectations. Is it not time to change our solution to match the market and cease blaming the greater-unchangeable?
Should recruitment agencies not move to become business efficiency agencies? Should estate agents not start a local email magazine interviewing 5 interesting people a day and challenging staff to get 20 new opt-in readers per day? Should small building manufacturers not start blogging on how new school playgrounds could be built, only to be thought leaders when times get better? Perhaps they should or shouldn’t. One thing is clear, as the market changes, the businesses that move to match change will survive. Those that shake their fist angrily at government will freeze.
Online marketing is the new business efficiency agency, the new estate agent, the new manufacturer. Those that get with the programme early will survive. Those that fail to understand the power of community and local leadership will struggle.
Archive for February, 2009
Why is it always someone else’s fault?
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
Sometimes appearing first on Google isn’t the answer
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009Let’s face it; no company is going to switch accountancy firm or choose a new lawyer based upon the search results they find in Google. This may help form an opinion on a professional services company but what we are really searching for is someone else’s opinion. We seek an endorsement from a third party or trusted friend.
The obstacles we face when switching our professional services providers are rarely that we want to know if a new accountancy practice can actually do our accounts or if a Hotel we want to stay in actually has beds. The obstacle to commitment is that we want to know what other people think about the service provider before we make our decision.
If this is the case, then why do professional services companies crave high rankings in Google and pay less attention to arming their existing customers with marketing collateral such as email marketing updates? A well-designed email can prove more effective as it is easy to forward and as it is forwarded on, comes with that third party endorsement built in already.
Why is less effort and money put into gaining visibility on blogs and forums that their potential customers typically read, illustrating that you are a thought leader in your chosen field?
Online PR and Email Marketing trump SEO for this sector every time in terms of return on investment and if done right, your position in Google will improve naturally as a result of your other activities.
PR agencies are in a bubble
Tuesday, February 10th, 2009PR agencies are benefiting out of this recession, but much of this success will be short lived. In my recent blog entry the death of the newspaper is nigh, I argue that the newspaper is in terminal decline, a fact that most journalists and newspaper owners I talk to don’t deny.
At the moment, many newspapers are not replacing or recruiting journalists because of their ever declining copy sales and reduced ad revenues. As a result, a short-lived opportunity has popped up for PR companies to help the newspaper editors fill their pages – copy is often skewed to promote a product or service and real investigative journalism is being replaced by less interesting corporate content. This action will only accelerate the decline of the paper in the long term, but in the short term, it allows PR agencies to cash in at the same time as keeping their customers happy.
But what happens when the newspapers start to go under? What happens when companies, charities and political parties come to the realisation that their customers are no longer taking opinion from newspapers but online? How many PR agencies and marketing departments are prepared? I believe it is only a matter of time before the PR bubble bursts. The only PR agencies that will grow are those which understand how to socialise online.
The death of the newspaper is nigh
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009Face facts…the newspaper as a means of speeding the news or opinion is dead. I declare that within the lifetime of most readers of this blog, we will see the end of the commercial daily newspaper as we know it.
I base this on fact and not hunch. Ten years ago, the UK Sunday newspaper circulation was twice what it is today. Out of the 60+ daily UK titles, only a few held audience figures last year and most experienced declines in readership of around 6%. Give it another ten years and the readerships will have at least halved again. The irony is…we are consuming more news now than ever before, but using the web to do it.
Worse news is that newspapers don’t make a huge pile of revenue from copy sales, they make it from advertising. How many people now go to their newspaper when looking for a car, holiday, job or even a date? All of this advertising revenue has moved online and the newspapers are doing a bad job of capturing the online spend. They use the old traditional advertising models and simply try to shift them to the internet. It’s time they restructured and got creative.
In previous newspaper dips, the pundits talked about cycles. Do they really think that all of the advertising spend will come back? With lower copy sales, falling advertising revenues and changing habits where readers demand up to the minute news on the mobile phone or across a myriad of devices, how will newsprint survive? The answer is it won’t.
“TV and radio both survived, one didn’t replace the other,” I hear you say. But I ask you how many people still used the horse and cart once motor transport became popular? The newspaper is the old horse we love and have an emotional attachment toward but I fear we must face its ever-imminent demise.
