By John Eberhard
I know it’s hard to believe. But there was a time when Google didn’t even exist. It was back in the Bronze Age, and I was tracking a mastodon…
Sorry. It was actually 1989, and I was working for a company as the Marketing Director. We were sending out mostly direct mail, and doing some display ads in trade magazines.
Then I worked for another company, and we did direct mail, ads in trade magazines, had booths at trade shows, and had cards in what were called card decks. A little later we sent out promotional faxes.
(And except for the faxes, all that stuff can still be done, depending on what industry you are in.)
Then the Internet happened, and possibilities seemed endless. At first the big search engines were Yahoo and Alta-Vista. Then in the early 2000s Google became the dominant search engine. Email marketing became a thing, and I worked for a software company and we made a lot of money sending promo email.
In the late 2000s social media became a platform that companies could use to market. And bulk texting became popular around the same time.
Unfortunately, due to forces described by Al Reis and Laura Reis in their book “The 11 Immutable Laws of Internet Branding,” eventually the number of marketing platforms has dwindled down to just a handful. And we have a relatively small number of online platforms that everyone uses and competes for to do their marketing.
The challenge today, as I see it, is to find and utilize marketing media and platforms that will work for your business and that aren’t overly saturated with players from your type of business. Here are some of the possibilities, and which of these you might use will depend on your type of business:
- Having a website for the business (I think nearly every type of business should have a website today, and keep it updated and fresh)
- Compiling an “in-house” email list, of customers and prospects, and emailing to it regularly, at least once a week
- Doing search engine optimization (SEO) actions to your website so it ranks highly on search engines for the keyword phrases you are targeting
- Setting up accounts on several social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, X, and LinkedIn, and posting content regularly, and doing actions to increase your audience size on each
- Doing paid advertising on Google Ads, including search campaigns, display campaigns, and YouTube video campaigns
- Doing paid advertising on Facebook
- Doing bulk texting to a list of customers and prospects
- Video marketing, including creating multiple videos, placing them on your website, posting them on YouTube, Vimeo and other platforms, and running video ads on Google
- Doing paid advertising on Bing Ads
- Doing paid ads on LinkedIn
- Sending out email to cold email lists (meaning lists of people you’ve never been in contact with), usually to a specific type of industry for B2B companies
- Direct mail (yes it still works)
For B2B companies (selling to businesses, not to consumers) these are some platforms:
- Exhibiting at trade shows
- Advertising in trade publications, on trade publication websites, and in their email newsletters
- Direct mail to the target industries
Get a free consultation on your marketing strategy and what media and platforms will work for you. Contact Real Web Marketing at 661-441-2429 or fill out a form here.
