The one resource no one can have more of is time. There is only so much time and you can’t get more of it. You can prioritize to decide how to spend your time. You can become efficient in the use of your time, but when time runs out, anything undone stays undone.
Business people, especially in small and medium sized organizations (SMO), tend to wear many hats. They don’t have a large staff of specialists working on a narrow task. So staff and managers in a SMO divide their time between many duties. Most SMO managers devote most of their time to the core competency items crucial to running their business. Support functions to the core business activities often are allocated as little time as possible. One such support task is marketing defined as anything that brings prospects into the sales process like brand building and advertising.
Many advertising methods are not very time consuming to setup nor do they require much ongoing time to maintain. Things like newspaper ads, yellow page ads, billboards, signage, and repeat radio spots can be created with a little bit of front end effort but require little or no ongoing activity other than paying for repeat ads. Publish some sort of ad and then wait for the phone to ring or a customer to walk in the door. This a set-it-up once, go passive, and then hope for the best approach that fits in well with the time constraints faced by most SMO managers. But is it effective in today’s world?
A passive approach advertising strategy is great if it works and it did for decades. But then along came the Internet. SMO managers reacted by creating a website which they used as a digital brochure that they created once, seldom updated and then sat back and hoped for the best – just like in the good old days of traditional advertising. That worked for a while, but along came search engines and the era of pull marketing appeared where competing for page #1 in search engines is important. Online marketing began to demand more time from SMO managers.
Then came Web 2.0, the era of user generated content. Suddenly a passive approach to the Internet using a static website with search optimization was not enough. SMO managers had to find the time to interact with customers. As the explosion of social media and content publication websites appeared, the demands on the time of SMO managers increased significantly. Where to find the time to participate in blogs, review sites, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, directories, etc, etc, etc?
Today we are in Internet Marketing era referred to as the ‘Content Marketing’ era. Content has always been king in marketing – what you say, who says it, how you say it, and where you say it ultimately is the most important aspect of advertising. But with the emergence of Social Media and multiple content publication sources, never have so many diverse communication options been available with the end user having as much access as the advertisers. So the time needed by advertisers to do everything has exploded.
So what did SMO managers do? Some saw the opportunities and adjusted their priorities and jumped in. But many just couldn’t find the time or chose to ignore the revolution in marketing and clung to increasingly ineffective old-world marketing methods; for example they keep running Yellow Page and newspaper ads even though that isn’t working well anymore. They just don’t have the time for digital world marketing or have time but resist the change.
However, tools are catching up with the challenge of managing digital marketing. One such tool is WSI ReachCast. ReachCast offers technology that allows loading content in one website hub called a Cast Page. From the ReachCast hub content is published across all of an organization’s web properties while at the same time monitoring chatter within the Internet for comments about that organization. And better yet, ReachCast includes real live humans that provide content for the organization and manage the publication of that content via the ReachCast system.
So with ReachCast, an SMO manager with very little time commitment can maximize the marketing opportunities the Internet provides. More, Content, More Places, More Customers. Problem solved; Internet Content Marketing without the learning curve and time commitment. To see how, view the below 5 minute videos and then contact us to discuss how to leverage your precious time.
