Internet Marketing Isn’t Free After All
By Anna Johnson on July 6th, 2009Writing in Search Marketing Standard, Frank Reed points to the phenomenon of small and medium businesses (SMBs) assuming that Internet marketing doesn’t cost any money.
Frank says that if you provide Internet marketing services then, when confronted with an SMB wanting to know how to market online for no cost, you should quickly exit! Otherwise you risk being pulled into the ‘SMB brain drain’ where the SMB will try to squeeze enough information out of you to allow them to act on it themselves.
SMBs instinctively want to do things for free or on the cheap. It’s because they don’t have much money. That’s understandable. But what isn’t understandable is the assumption that while it costs money to advertise in the local newspaper or in the Yellow Pages… search engine marketing, online advertising and other Internet marketing methods don’t or shouldn’t cost anything.
Sure, Internet marketing can cost less than traditional marketing methods. And yes, there are many things SMBs can do themselves that don’t cost money. In these circumstances there are, however, at least three other costs: the time involved in doing something they could otherwise outsource, the opportunity cost of not spending that time doing something more productive, and the cost of doing a poor job.
Nonetheless, if expertise is required – whether it’s in copywriting, search engine optimization or web design – the average SMB is usually well advised to get the help of an expert. Whatever the costs involved in hiring someone… the costs of doing it themselves are usually much greater. If an SMB can’t afford to hire someone to help, then they must accept the consequences of either not doing what they wanted to do, or of doing a suboptimal job themselves.
That doesn’t mean delegating all the thinking to someone else. In fact, the better an SMB’s general knowledge about a given task, the better their ability to evaluate the skilfulness of someone they hire. Also, there may be some simple things – such as the ability to upload a webpage – that are more cost-effective for a business owner to do themselves, rather than outsource it to someone else.
Getting expert help does, however, mean losing the attitude about Internet marketing being free, appreciating the costs of NOT hiring experts, and making more strategic investments.
