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Internet marketing, website marketing, call it what you will, can be a bit
like a maze. You charge off down one route......dead end. Someone sends you
off down another route with a big smile on their face.......another dead end.
Another route looks promising.......until it fizzles out and you reach another
dead end. You can't cheat by looking over the hedge, it's about 20 feet high!
A big ladder so you can get a good view? No, they've all been hidden. None left
on the planet! Except those in the vaults of the internet gurus, you suspect.
So, you keep going around this maze, and at every turn there's advertising,
all about the maze itself, telling you about which way to go. Plans of the maze
which, if you follow, may get you half way round, only to find you need to buy
another plan to get the rest of the way. So what do you do? Carry on around
this maze unaided? Or buy another plan? You buy another plan of this maze, and
lo and behold, you end up at a place somewhere near the exit into real open
daylight (you think), but how do you get the correct final few turns? Anyway,
maybe you're not near the exit after all? You could be on the far side of the
maze from the exit. Sound familiar?
If you've been researching the internet from a business point of view for any
length of time, you have probably found that much of the advertising, the marketing,
is about ................. internet marketing. This is partly why it can seem
like a maze. If you are not sure what is going to work to market your website,
or the products in it, how do you know which advice to listen too, which "offers"
to take up?
Why is Internet Marketing Such a Maze?
Marketing is a subject I've been interested in for many years, long before
I was partner in an advertising related business in the early 90's. Then, marketing
was a quite stable world. The most recent "change" of any significance
had been TV, and TV advertising had evolved steadily over several decades. It
was glossy, glamorous, and...........very expensive. That was good for the big
advertising agencies, and they chased the big advertisers with massive budgets
for TV advertising. They had their creative departments to come up with memorable
TV ads, often designed to be memorable rather than to sell, and their media
buyers to buy time on the commercial TV stations.
The glamour was in TV, but every company and every agency would work on a marketing
mix: radio advertising, sales promotions, glossy magazine advertising, newspaper
advertising, trade ads, direct mail.....all played their part. These all had
one thing in common, though: they had been around for a very long time. Marketing
was a stable industry, not in economic terms, but in the "tricks of the
trade". There were a few minor variations here and there, but basically,
the marketing industry had its accepted, well documented, ways of doing things.
Skill levels varied of course, and that's where competition came in between
the agencies and between companies in the same industries. The point is, though,
it was all basically stable. Good or bad, it was stable.
Then along came the internet. Being involved in advertising in the mid 90's,
it was obvious to me that the potential was absolutely enormous. Mind boggling.
It was difficult to demonstrate, though, as speeds were painfully slow. You'd
try to show someone over a cup of coffee or tea, and you'd finish the drink
while the second page was loading. Try coming back in 5 years. Well, they did.
With a vengeance.
The internet itself came on in leaps and bounds after that. Technically it
developed rapidly. Companies started to realise they "had" to have
an internet presence. Why? Well, often because their competitor did, or because
they thought they should before their competitor did. They were diving in, pretty
much blind; they did not understand what they were getting into. The stock markets
cottoned on that something big was in the offing, so .com shares were being
touted to ever higher levels. Shares of companies with no substance in most
cases.
I used to trade shares on a daily basis in those days, and I never touched
one internet related company. I cringed every time I saw the financial figures
of a listed .com. Prices of shares were often in the stratosphere while turnover
was meagre and profits non existent, then and into the future. The traders in
the London Stock Exchange and Wall Street did not understand. The internet was
new, there was no history to go on. They simply did not understand. They were
excited, and were exciting others too. The buying was frantic. The crash inevitable.
Companies all over the world were realising, though, that they must have a
web presence. Companies had marketing departments and/or advertising agencies.
So they too had to go along with the the tidal wave of internet anticipation.
What did they do? They followed the accepted patterns for marketing in those
days. TV advertising. Radio advertising. Big newspaper ads. The massive costs
of those methods bore no relationship then to the potential for additional income,
for sales. They were throwing money down the drain in most cases. Why? They
simply did not understand!
The internet was, and is, a revolution in communications. But the marketing
industry had not had a revolution, it was too bogged down in the rest of the
marketing mix to realise what was really going on here. The printing press was
a revolution in communications, but it took many years to spread its influence.
Radio was a revolution in communications; likewise. TV? Likewise.
The internet has been more like an explosion, and after an explosion it takes
time for the dust to settle. That's one of the reasons for the maze of internet
marketing. The dust is still settling. You can't see through the dust yet. More
of a haze than a maze I suppose! No, a maze in a haze!
About the Author:
Roy Thomsitt is owner and author of http://www.change-direction.com |
