Social media is easy. SEO is easy. Blogging is easy.
Stop saying it. It’s not true. Technology is daunting. Conventional companies struggle with leveraging technology and newer channels to get positive results. Many abandon or avoid it altogether. Online search and social media are no less daunting.
- Twitter is simple. Right? How hard is it to type 140 characters? It’s not… unless you are tied up at work with many other responsibilities, under pressure to deliver results during this recession, and want to blend a great tweet with some healthy tracking to drive traffic back to your site to convert a customer. And do it all without alienating the following and damaging your brand.
- Optimization is easy. Right? Just find keywords and repeat them a ton of times. Sure… unless you’re actually competing for a keyword – then SEO is much more difficult.
- Pay-per-click is easy. Right? Set a PPC budget and press go. And subsequently, run your budget dry without getting any conversions. Improving ad quality scores, setting up calls to action, targeting your content, scheduling your ads, initiating a negative keyword strategy, and optimizing your landing page isn’t quite that easy.
- Blogging is a piece of cake. Right? Install and customize WordPress on a cheap hosting account and write. Optimize your theme. Optimize each post. Promote the blog. Syndicate the content. Every day, write about the same products, services, and customers. Every day, make the content rich for search, compelling for visitors and pull prospects into sales.
Day 1 is easy.
Day 180 is not so easy.
We’re currently working with a client that has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on traditional media, with abysmal results, but never fully invested in an online strategy for a couple of reasons:
- They did not have the internal expertise to define and execute a winning strategy fully.
- They didn’t bother to hire consultants because everyone made it out to be easy. They made a half-ditch effort and didn’t get results… so they returned to traditional media.
The opportunity for them is incredible, but they’ve been disillusioned by reading article after article on how easy things are. It’s not easy, folks! On this specific client, I’ll probably be working with no less than five different service providers, including a PPC management firm, an SEO firm, a content strategist, a branding and graphics firm, and we’ll be employing our own strategies for search and social media with them. It’s a complex strategy that we have minimal time to develop, execute, and begin measuring results on.
Oh, and if we can’t get the acquisition costs down within 6 to 9 months, we lose the client.
That’s not easy.
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