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Written by Jim OConnell
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Thursday, 22 September 2011 15:44 |
The media landscape has changed, bringing with it a new perspective and more advantages for small to medium businesses.
What it means for You
Traditionally, when a business wanted to reach potential customers, the owner would go to the media outlets: newspapers, radio, television. Each is made up of a large body of subscribers, listeners and viewers owned by separate media companies. It's an outside-in approach. You rent daily space on their network with the intent to reach a small percentage of a larger audience that is your market. Your ad is created by their art department, and then you pay a premium to run the ad per day. The ad is viewed by the audience as an interruption or distraction to their main purpose, which is to deliver news or entertainment. It's cost prohibitive for a small business to do enough advertising to make a campaign effective. Even at best, it's difficult to sustain.
The shift in thinking is to develop your marketing plan based on an inside-out approach. This is done by utilizing the best and most effective form of marketing available: word of mouth. The concept is to develop your network of followers from those who already know you or your products. Who else is more qualified or more effective at helping you build a following? The beauty of doing it online is that it is faster and now easier than ever.
It doesn’t take much to realize that the best place to grow new business is through your existing customer base. It's easier to sell to existing customers than to acquire new ones.
At Resource Media, we help you create and grow YOUR MEDIA NETWORK. A network that you own, not rent. A network that is made up of current customers and those who have expressed an interest in your products or services. Once the network is created, you can invest the dividend originally set aside for media placement and transfer it to a long-term, high-yield asset: content. As you add content, instead of it expiring on the same day, it stays on your network where it can be searched and viewed indefinitely. Each time it is viewed, you receive a return on your initial investment. In addition, you're regularly adding new content, creating and building an asset versus paying out on an expense.
Imagine if you could gather all of your customers into an auditorium each day. You would come to the microphone and let them know your daily specials, give them tips on how to use your product or service, perhaps offer them something special. Then you would have a question and answer session. This is what you're doing virtually through the new media. Initially, your auditorium may have a hundred people. But as you grow your network, the seats in your auditorium keep filling up.
It's not to say that traditional advertising doesn't have its place. For the times when it does make sense to advertise in traditional media, you can maximize that advertising by directing our audience to YOUR online network, capturing additional members for tomorrow's announcement from the auditorium stage!
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