Internet is the New Marketing

When was the last time you were considering making a significant investment of time or money and you did the following?

Used the yellow pages
Got on a plane to go to a trade show
Responded to a print advertisement
Responded to a direct mail advertisement
Did a search in Google or another search engine
Asked a friend for advice, and they emailed you a URL as a response

If you’re like most of us, the first thing you did was hop online and search. In fact, 98% of us use Google to help us locate, research and contact a vendor. And we’re not just talking buyers—job seekers, investors and even employees turn to the internet as a first resource.

Source: MarketingSherpa

Marketing Must Adapt

What this means is that organizations must recognize this new behavior and adapt their marketing and sales tactics accordingly. Traditional marketing tactics that relied on the telephone or in-person contact are delivering far less in results. The shift to internet marketing tactics based on a sound marketing strategy is delivering more yield.

So what, exactly, do we mean by traditional versus internet tactics? Take a look at this comparison:

Traditional Marketing Tactics

Inside Sales
Telemarketing
Tradeshows
Seminars
Print Advertising
Direct mail/email

Internet Marketing Tactics

SEO
Pay per click
Blogging
Social Media
Targeted Landing Pages
Marketing Analytics

The New Marketing Goal

Today, the goal of marketing must be to “get found” when the target market is looking—not “get in their face” when they are not looking. Because buyers use search early on in the sales cycle, only 25% of leads are sales ready at any given time. The remaining prospects are somewhere in the buying cycle but not necessarily ready for sales.

Marketing’s role is to help the business understand at what point in the buying cycle your customers and prospects are. Internet marketing tactics facilitate the collection of valuable feedback data that can provide this information as well as guide the nurture process and identify when to push sales-ready leads to your sales department.

New Rules of Internet Marketing

This dramatic shift in buyer behavior cannot be ignored. Marketers must abide by three new rules of marketing:

Get found by qualified prospects
Provide prospects with a relevant website experience
Convert prospects to customers, investors, employees, etc.

It’s not about pushing product or service. Instead, it’s about having a meaningful dialogue with customers and prospects that they deem valuable. If you can become a brilliant conversationalist within the terms of internet dialogue, you are sure to achieve success.

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