Picking a Marketing Agency – Do You Need Professional Help?
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Do you need help from a professional marketing agency? That’s a question only you can answer. You have the 30,000-foot perspective on how you’re doing relative to your business goals.
But as you weigh your decision, let me offer a couple points:
First, bad marketing is worse than no marketing at all. The reason is that it takes more time and money to repair the damage from a bad impression, than to make a first impression of any kind.
Second, it’s not enough to just do more of what you’re used to doing already – if what you’re doing is conventional marketing like advertising, call outs, mailers and Yellow Pages. The world of marketing has expanded far beyond those tools. The interactive nature of the Internet has put more emphasis on inbound marketing rather than traditional “push” marketing. And if those terms look unfamiliar, that’s one sign that it may be the right time to bring a professional on board.
We won’t keep you in the dark, though. Inbound marketing is about attracting prospects rather than cornering or hounding them. Push marketing is a collective term for a lot of tools you might be familiar with: cold calls, advertising, telemarketing and any other method you use to push your message in front of your target market. Inbound marketing, on the other hand, involves helping your target market find you easily when they are searching for help. It includes such tools as search engine optimization (SEO), which is a way of making sure your website contains the same key words that people are most likely to use when they are looking for your kind of product or service. But it has to be done in a way that impresses both search engines and high-potential prospects. And SEO is only one of many tools used in inbound marketing.
As Laura Ramos of Forrester Research wrote in How To Avoid Becoming Obsolete, “Focusing simply on new campaigns, clever advertising and delving into social media will only paper over problems. Turning up the heat on conventional marketing activities won’t spur the profound changes required.”
Are you ready to try something new to attract the attention your business needs to thrive?
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