Way to go Ozburn-Hessey and Pow Pictures! One of GoEpps' clients, Ozburn-Hessey, has produced a new video about their recently completed flooring project at the Country Music Hall of Fame. They partnered with Pow Pictures to create the video.
Thank you to client Wright Manufacturing for having me out to speak to the incoming dealers. It was great to share what we have done this year with online marketing and what we are doing over the upcoming year.
When people find out what I do, I get a lot of questions. A recurring one lately has been from existing businesses who feel their marketing is lacking, and they’ll wonder aloud to me if they should build a more sophisticated and internal Internet marketing team.
My answer is always straight forward: If you’re not an Internet company, then no. You’d be taking your profitable business model and focusing energy into something you’re not experienced to handle. This is what you’d be getting yourself into:
Most "sales leads" are not very good.
Most leads sent to a sales floor are not from reliable sources. They are essentially data that is being passed around and then filtered through a sales team working on commission. Sales teams become jaded, because why call one more person whose information has been carelessly passed around and is probably no longer interested?
It’s a sad fact: For a long time, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has mostly been about trickery. It’s been about gaming the crowd or pulling one over. Frankly, it’s been about scoring the most traffic and giving the least care to consequences. Content farming and phishing have devoted careers to winning this game, but more recently that strategy is losing.
While some office environment look like fun, it begs the question of whether overly fun is the best way things can be done. A new approach to marketing is forming that puts performance first.
I recently came across Judy Shapiro’s AdAge article titled, "Five Hyper-Local Marketing Trends to Take the Street Fight to the Next Level."
A street fight. It’s a perfectly coined phrase to describe the work that goes into finding ways to best connect with people through media. In her piece, Judy recognizes the need for companies to look past the typical, hyper-technology approach of finding clients, but to revisit a grassroots way of finding customers: hyper-localized terms are where we connect with people.
few weeks ago, I had 3 different people ask me - in a 24 hour period - for tips on developing good content for their website. They wanted to know any pros or cons for developing their own content, and what GoEpps could offer. They wanted to know what we do, how we do it, and why it works.
Three similar inquiries in one day begged a larger question: Why is good content so hard to find?
Most manufacturers have bad websites.
You may have spent a lot of time developing your ideas, you may even have spent a lot of money making them a reality. But your baby is ugly.
Why does this happen? There are three main reasons:
Search engine optimization is a marketing channel like any other. The "ad" in the case of SEO is your own quality content and optimized pages.
But how can you measure the value of doing more SEO work compared to the more clear decision that ad campaigns offer? If an ad campaign costs $2,500 and delivers $10,000 in sales, you have a return on investment of 300%. But how do you measure the value of a blog post when you have traffic coming in from multiple sources? How do you measure the value of the post when traffic comes in directly, from search engines, from referral sites, and from you own social media mentions of the content.