You’ve heard it before. The modern consumer doesn’t use the phone book. They pick up their laptop, tablet, or smartphone, and start searching. They pull up Google and search for products. They log in to Facebook, Twitter, or Foursquare, and ask who’s trustworthy. They look at reviews from their peers on Google+ Local, and they get driving directions from Google Maps.
Meanwhile, they are using their DVR to skip through the commercials, installing ad filters to remove affiliate displays from their web experience, and psychologically filtering out everything else.
The idea that you can interrupt somebody’s day in order to earn a profit is going out of style, because for the first time since radio there is a scalable alternative. The best prospects are the ones already looking for the products and services you sell.
Welcome to the age of inbound marketing.
Who Are We?
We didn’t get into internet marketing with the goal of selling it as a service. Our experience started with personal struggles and victories operating our own eCommerce sites since 1998, when Infoseek, Alta Vista, and Yahoo were the only major search engines.
Since that time, we have developed and honed abilities that have allowed us to greatly improve visibility in the search engines, get and keep social and email subscribers, improve conversion rates, and grow a brand. These skills include:
▪ Search Engine Optimization
▪ Pay Per Click advertising
▪ Cost Per Action advertising
▪ Affiliate Networking
▪ Lead Generation
▪ Outreach
▪ Relationship building
Since 2003, our internet marketing efforts alone have produced more than $50,000,000 in gross revenues for our own companies. We have built and sold over $3,000,000 in eCommerce sites alone. Put simply, we understand how to market other people’s businesses because we have successfully marketed our own online businesses for years.
Our success is not the result of tricking in the search engines, a “loophole” in the setup of social media, or a “tactic” that relies on the current structure of the web. It is built around an understanding of the psychology of the consumer, the constantly changing nature of the web, and the power of branding.
Reaching the Right Consumers
There’s something to be said for powering ahead and creating new markets. It’s our belief that this is when “outbound marketing” makes sense. Sometimes it’s important to inform people about solutions to problems that they are unaware of.
But it’s equally true that outbound marketing, traditional advertising, is a “shotgun” approach. Most of the people who hear your message don’t have the problem you’re solving, and so most of your marketing budget is wasted on consumers that aren’t interested in what you’re selling. You don’t have to throw away money like this.
Search engine optimization gets you listed right where your target audience is looking for you. Search ads allow you to pay for ads next to the search results, but only when they are looking for products like yours, and only when users actually click on the ads.
Meanwhile, social media allows you to start conversations with influencers, customers, and consumers. Email marketing gives you the opportunity to target only the members of your audience that really want to hear your message.
Marketing dollars spent on people that have no interest in your products are a waste. It’s time to start investing your budget in the people who really matter to the future of your business.
Pay a Fair Price, Not a “Cheap” One
If you’ve been in business long enough to seek us out, you know nothing comes free in this world. Success takes time, money, or both. Offers that sound too good to be true usually are. Of course, not everyone is web-savvy enough to understand what “too good to be true” looks like in the internet marketing industry. We would consider these warning signs:
▪ Promises of instant improvement in the search results or number of social followers
▪ Promises of reaching the #1 spot in Google (meaningless without context anyway)
▪ Unwillingness to share strategies or sources
▪ Unwillingness to adapt to your needs as a brand, not just a website
You may have heard of algorithm changes like “Panda” or “Penguin.” These are changes Google has made to their search engine in order to remove spam, manipulation, and low quality content. It is impossible to achieve huge amounts of search engine traffic in a short period of time with small investments without the risk of facing penalties like these.
Boosts in your number of social followers or subscribers overnight and at low cost are almost always the result of fake profiles that don’t represent real people. Needless to say, a fake following is useless for branding and sales.
“Internet marketers” that don’t share their strategies or sources with their clients are almost certainly doing something manipulative, such as building a series of low quality sites and linking them to yours. This behavior will only hurt your search results and your brand image in the long run.
Finally, firms that refuse to align their strategy with yours as a business don’t see internet marketing as real marketing. They see it as a technical exercise for short-term results.
We charge a fair price and are committed to ROI for our clients, but the last thing we want to be is a “cheap” SEO firm. “Cheap” means little to no results, short-term benefits with long-term losses, damaged reputations, playing catch up, and wasted money. This is not what we want for our hard working and valued clients.
Our results don’t come from cheap tricks. They come from building relationships, doing outreach, producing high quality content, and building a genuine online presence.
We are interested in forging a true partnership with our clients that will enable us to understand their business as well as our own.
To find out if your business is a good fit, give us a call at 512-346-5000, or fill out our Free Consultation Form so that we can determine your needs and what we can do to help.