I was speaking with a prospective licensee today and he asked me some questions about how to effectively use the 1-800-PLUMBING number. The discussion we had gave me the inspiration to write this blog.
I was thinking about marketing and advertising and how to come up with an effective campaign. What came to mind was a spider building a web and how that is a great metaphor to illustrate a great marketing technique. A spider builds different areas of its web until it has a relatively huge area covered. Once the web is built they will catch all the insects they need to survive. If the web is not big enough they probably won’t catch enough to eat. If you look at the picture, you see some connections have been broken. Some advertising that you try will not work, so you have to have enough different elements to make sure that if 1 or 2 are not effective that the main structure of the web will still remain in place.
If you could go to “The customer store” and plunk down $2000 for 500 customers every month, that would be a great deal. Every month you could pay the money and get enough customers to generate $200,000 in business and everything would be great.
However, that is just a fantasy land and real marketing and branding is like the spider building a web. When the internet first became popular, “the web” in its infancy was not very big. Over the past 10 years or so that has changed. Now the web is much more like a spider’s web. We now have so many individual elements that can be included to build a web of marketing and advertising. Some of the useful elements include: website links, SEO, PPC, Twitter, Facebook, Video, Linked In, You Tube, Animation, Web Radio, Web TV, On line coupons. These are all part of the “on line web” I would never tell someone to rely on just the on line portion as you can develop a synergy by utilizing on line marketing in conjunction with off line marketing. Now you have the ability to point your customers at your on line campaigns with your off line marketing. You can use flyers, newspapers, local sponsorships, billboards, radio, TV, etc as standalone marketing and also have them point to web links that tie everything together.
The main key is to make sure that you build your web large enough so that you can grow your business in a manner that meets your expectations. Do enough different things so you can capture a large enough audience and get their attention. This takes time, commitment, dedication, and a lot of work. I don’t believe there are any short cuts. I know from experience as I see results from the SEO campaign with our website. At first I did not see much, but over time it has grown and we now see great results on a consistent basis. This is after over a year of effective SEO techniques on our site.
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