In 2007 popular website search engine land predicted that ‘Yellow pages will be toast in 4 years’. We are now 4 years on and while it would be wrong to say that no-one uses the traditional yellow book for directory information we can safely say that the majority of people use online search engines to find out about companies and products.

It is difficult in worlds to stress how important an online presence really is but to give some perspective here is a great statistic.  The average person spends 32 hours a month on the internet – just over an hour a day EVERY DAY.* How many other forms of mediums can we say that about? Television I hear you scream! Yes – but can you afford thousands of pounds per second!?

Still not convinced? Why…

Many companies perhaps like yours still have traditional beliefs about how their company generates customers such as word of mouth, local newspaper/ magazine adverts. While that still may be true even these simple marketing concepts are not free from the digital revolution. Peoples social behaviours have changed and adapted – they write information down on their phones which they can copy and paste into a search engine, they forget the exact name of the company recommended to them – they use the internet to search for the company. Print adverts are often now put up on newspapers online sites for FREE!  These are just a few examples but you get the idea – so you can see these traditional marketing approaches have also adapted – so you need to ask yourself have we adapted to fit in with these changes?

The benefits and Return on Investment (ROI) for shedding out more of your budget online are numerous and here are a few:
  • Brand awareness
  • Visibility
  • The ability to compete effectively
  • Gain valuable insights into your stakeholders through web analytics
  • Better customer contact which is likely to lead to better retention
  • More sales!
  • The ability to compete on a GLOBAL scale!
  • You will have a presence 24 hours a day 7 days a week, 365 days a year! No overtime required!

Today any product, brand and service should have either its own website or be featured heavily on a company’s main site. In today’s competitive market companies can’t afford their products not to be if the majority of people are searching online (which is only ever going to increase) it is important to save a proportion of your budget and time on online marketing.