Businesses in every market gets the importance of investing in marketing - the oxygen for a business. With the advent of internet commerce, business owners are investing in their online presence and digital marketing, on top of existing efforts such as print, television, and radio.

Those who get it right are growing market share, making more profit, and well on their way to lead their markets tomorrow.

Those who don't get it right will... well, waste money on deadends, clueless about how much market share they are losing, and eventually be on its way out of business.

1. Most business owners who invest in digital advertising today will see little to no return on investment.

In the Wild Wild West days of Internet advertising, you can make money if you invest like you do with traditional media in the past. Today, as consumers have more entertainment options, they are bombarded with more advertising messages more than ever. You need to get all the elements working well enough just to break even, such as client profiling, wordsmanship, proper search marketing strategy, audio/video/document media channels, mobile support, social media networks, and retargeting.

2. New competitors are stealing market share with better salesmanship, not products.

This is true especially with the Internet. Most business owners will abandon their marketing and digital efforts in less than six months after starting because they don’t see any measurable ROI. Those who persists through the bad results will ultimately win, as marketing strategy, like many other processes, is all about iteration. Clients cannot tell you have a better product without having been sold successfully by your team in the first place!

3. Persuading clients to buy more products and often from you is more important than ever.

Sure, the Internet has made acquiring clients cheaper. You can use the analytics to reduce waste over time. At the same time, it's never been easier for clients to change vendors, with all the new competitors flooding into the market locally, not to mention the global marketplaces. Communicating with your clients persuasively is as much of an art as science itself. Not doing this right means you'll never make any real money, as the competition would pressure client acquisition costs to rise again.

You may have only heard of countless sales pitches from Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Paid Search, or advertising firms. If you're really innovative, you may have heard about social media marketing, such as Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter.

It's not just having a website that can be opened by anything under the sun, and being found on the Internet. It's about your product-to-market fit, on top of your print salesmanship persuading browsers into buyers.

Here's the low-down of the tools available at your disposal, and their respective benefits:

Before I walk you through each of these strategies, let me reveal who works on the marketing in most companies.

Tactics, tools, and solutions are out there. Knowing how and when to use what may not be obvious.

98% of businesses have tried at least one out of a variety of digital solutions in attempts to get new customers. However, without getting the how and when correct, most will fail, get frustrated, and fold the efforts altogether.

Businesses today will typically use one of these three ways to create and deploy their marketing solutions.

1. Do-It-Yourself (DIY, or Handling It Internally)

Some firms have the internal resources to do this. They either have the money to recruit the best proven marketing talent full-time with benefits. If not, business owners usually delegate this responsibility to administrative assistants (a.k.a. secretaries).

If you have the ability to hire talent full-time to handle your marketing in-house, I applaud you. I wish you the best, and you don't need to read any more of this website.

However, if you're thinking of delegating this responsibility to your administrative assistant, think again. Are you or your assistant already trained with the skills and nuances of digital advertising? If not, do either of you have the time to figure it out? This is likely not a feasible option, or too much of a hit-or-miss endeavor even if your assistant does have the time. Do you want your business to depend on a hit-or-miss endeavor?

2. "I Know A Guy"

This is often an independent contractor (maybe even a college graduate) who has some website design experience. While they may be savvy with structuring and laying out websites, whether they have experience with persuasion, content marketing, and marketing strategy is hit-or-miss. Again, do you want your business to depend on a hit-or-miss endeavor?

3. Hiring A Professional Firm

If you don't want to pay full-time staff to handle this, and cautious about hit-or-miss approach, this may be your best option. However, a lot of these firms are throwing you features of what they sell left and right. What do those features have to do with getting you more sales?

I'm gonna cover this with the rest of this page, explaining each strategy one by one.

By the time you finished reading this page, you'll know how to turn your marketing strategy into a vending machine (i.e. predictable) rather than a slot machine (i.e. random).

In a nutshell, this has to do with being found on the Internet when the problems you solve are being searched.

Why is this important?

If you're not listed on the top of the search results, your message doesn't get opened. If it doesn't get opened, it doesn't get read, and you can't expect a sale to happen out of this opportunity.

According to this study, close to 70% of searchers open the top 3 results. 40% opened the top result.

Most searchers open the top links, and compare them on different tabs of the web browsers simultaneously!

Here's how my team handles SEO strategy:

Sounds simple enough?

Well, if you try to do it yourself, or cheap out on the firm you hire, these problems will likely arise.

Those problems are serious. They are like the graffiti on your commercial property's wall.

Sure, they attract attention. But is it the attention you want?

On another note, here are some common missed opportunities with SEO:

Sure... you can spend weeks learning SEO basics in your car. But who has the time?

If you're smart, you'd look for help.

Book your strategy session now, and I'll share how you can specifically improve on your Internet presences in the call.

Let's move onto paid search strategy.

SEO is nice. Buyers want to find relevant solutions to their problems.

However, it takes time - at least one to two quarters to see any effect, provided the right strategy is implemented.

If you're not willing to wait, there is one way provided you're willing to pay a premium  - paid search.

Because so few ordinary users (38% according to Pew Research Center) realized that many of the highest placed "results" are actually advertising, search engines like Google sells these spots to merchants like you.

In fact, two thirds of 2013 revenue of Google is from paid search (or $37 billion).

Provided you don't overbid, and you made enough sales, paid search can be a valuable asset.

If you don't watch out for these perils, you could be burning a lot of money.

Buying advertising on search engines is not as straight-forward as buying traditional ads. Even though there's more analytics to keep you accountable, interpreting the numbers and making appropriate changes are required skills to make these ads pay.

Sure, you can allocate budget to experiment. But seriously, do you have the time to figure this out yourself, on top of your other responsibilities within your business?

Sign up for a free 30-minute strategy session, and my team will map out your paid search strategy.

Let's move onto social media network.

Like it or not, your customers are hanging out on at least one of these platforms: Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Yelp, Foursquare.

One way consumers determine whether you're in business on the Internet is monitoring your social media activity. If you want to whine about the extra work here, you won't be when you see competitors taking market share away from you there.

Social media network is more than just a client acquisition tool.

It can be used for customer service (great examples include AT&T, Netflix, and Nordstrom).

Or product development (Zappos, VitaminWater, and Superfly.com acted on valuable feedback there).

Or even human resources (or else tools like Linkedin and Yammer wouldn't exist).

As the cost of attracting attention with search engine continues to rise, many startups use intrusive social media advertising to test product ideas.

Anyway, here are the common pitfalls you would want to avoid if you were doing this yourself:

Again, we know you're already swamped enough from being active on social networks, let alone learning how to do it properly.

The easier way is signing up for a free 30-minute strategy session, and my team will map out your social network marketing strategy. You've got nothing to lose, even if it's 30-minutes to educate yourself, and then training college students to handle internally.

Let's move onto email marketing.

Assuming your advertising (search, social, print, TV, radio) is at least making you money, in many cases I can bet you're not making as many sales as you can.

At any given point, this is the typical distribution of buyer responses (quoted from page 64 of The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes, who was mentored by Warren Buffett's right hand man, Charlie Munger at one time).

If your ads are working, you should be able to grab a significant portion of A with little difficulty.

D and E are impossible to sell, hence you shouldn't even waste time on them.

The interesting portions are B and C.

If you try to close the sale with only one step, you'll face tremendous difficulty doing so with B and C.

However, if you lower your friction of contact with a valuable lead magnet, and advertise this instead, you'll get an in with this group. Over time, you can educate them while building trust by sharing your expertise. When they are ready to solve the problem, they are more likely to think of you rather than your competitor if you've done a good job building the relationships.

Email marketing, combined with other advertising efforts, allows you to accomplish this without killing yourself with all the manual follow-up.

Here are some additional benefits:

You may have doubts about its effectiveness. For example, whether you'll get people to give you their contact information for your gift. Or whether you'll receive fake email addresses.

Your concerns are legitimate, and I'll address them one by one.

To answer whether people will give you contact information, the result depends on how valuable is your gift. Assuming your gift is valuable, if you're still not getting results, either there are some flaws with the marketing, or the target segment will not buy from you under any circumstances even if you have their contact information.

Regarding the concern about people giving you fake email addresses for the gift, don't waste time trying to get them to like you. These people will never buy from you anyway. And you can deliberately ask for their best or company email addresses to only spend attention on serious buyers.

In order to reap the most reward out of this tactic, you may want to inform yourself about these common pitfalls.

You may be sitting on an email list already, after doing a good job collecting names.

If you're scratching your head on monetizing from it, sign up for the strategy session. My team will go through your assets, and suggest a number of ways to solve this problem.

Let's move onto retargeting advertising.

Let's say you can get buyers to click on your ads, but not stay on your site. Are you screwed?

In the early 2000s, the answer would've been yes.

Today, the answer is changing.

There's a technology called retargeting. How it works is as follows:

Let's say you visit a website after being persuaded by a referral source. After you spent a minute there, you leave the website, doing nothing.

You get tracked by a piece of software called "retargeting cookies." It's like a fingerprint that tracks your activities all over the Internet.

For example, when you're taking a break socializing on Facebook or watching cat videos on Youtube, the website's advertising would show up in your face.

This used to be reserved for Fortune 500 companies. However, in recent years (starting in the early 2010s), the price points dropped enough that the technology is democratized for small businesses.

In plain English, if you're getting clicks from your other ads, this is a low-hanging fruit you can leverage.

Here are other benefits:

Although there are a lot of benefits with retargeting, these common pitfalls could make it go sour:

Although retargeting is easier to figure out compared to other marketing channels, which business owner has the time to do so adequately? If you want this figured out for you, enter your information below for a strategy session. My team will figure it out for you, and you can either implement it yourself, or hire my team to do it for you.

Let's move onto other hidden sales boosters.

Many business owners are focused on acquiring new clients. As a result, they are likely neglecting the clients they are losing.

If you know how to talk to them, show you've changed and you're listening, and ask for another chance, this can be a lucrative profit center for your business.

Recouping 10 lost clients to do business again with you has the same effect as winning 10 brand new clients. The former is often easier to accomplish, provided that you're offering high quality products or services.

You basically look through your sales history, hunt for the best clients you've lost, reflect possibly why you lost their business. Once you've prepared yourself, you contact them, reintroduce yourself, remind them how you've done business together initially, and ask for feedback. Once you receive the feedback, explain what happened, how your business has changed, and make a special offer for them to give you a chance again. Then, make sure you deliver to keep the business.

On the same note, here are some common mistakes business owners make with this.

Although there are a lot of benefits with retargeting, these common pitfalls could make it go sour:

Although this tactic doesn't require you to understand computer technology, the required persuasive skills aren't for novices. You can take a shortcut by signing up for a strategy session, and take advantage of my team, who has gone through tens of thousands of dollars worth of training materials on this topic alone.

But wait! I'm not done yet.

I've got one last surprise for you.

Let's face it... many business owners don't enjoy prospecting.

You're spending a fortune to acquire clients from search, social media, display, and traditional advertising.

Or, you're spending a lot of time cold-calling potential buyers, with many being rude or hostile to your phone calls.

There is a strategy that would multiply this effort.

In fact, enterprise companies are all doing this. If they aren't doing this, they think they are doing something wrong!

This strategy makes an even bigger impact on small businesses compared to multinational corporations.

Your activities here are very difficult for your competition to detect, let alone mimic.

If you want to find out what it is, enter your contact information in the box specifically below (the other boxes won't work).

No... I did not draw the Marvel comics Spiderman.

I'd happy to achieve an even better effect for your business.

Here's the low-down:

I learned the importance of sales, marketing, and persuasion when it comes to building wealth - especially after a series of major setbacks.

What kinds of setbacks you may ask?

How about being forced by the economy to find another way to make money after wasting time on a supposedly "in-demand" college degree?

Or follow your passion only to find it to be oversaturated with supply, and not as many people willing and able to pay for the skills?

Or building the product and pray that customers would come?

Sure, I've gained skills with math (money and percentage math is nothing compared to solving reverse kinematics problems), problem-solving, and computer applications (even though it wasn't sufficient to keep me from getting fired from my only "good-paying" job out of college).

But the epiphany is - sales and persuasion trumps everything!

Not only persuasion feeds families (yours or employees), it also helps you recruit staff, and asking for help.

It also allows you to solve problems that not having money creates.

It's one thing to sell snake oil... it's another to sell solutions.

Sometimes, persuasion is a problem to solve within itself. After all, if you didn't do enough homework beforehand, you won't persuade anyone since you're attacking the wrong problem!

To start with me as a founder, I'm either quoted or featured on these sites.

But the credibility you should be focusing on isn't mine. After all, I'm an entrepreneur who sources talent who can help (e.g. SEO, Paid Search, SMM, Retargeting, Analysts, and Email Marketing technicians), and business owners who need the help.

By having to talk to only 5 people like me instead of 50 business owners like you, the technicians benefit from the additional time they can spend working on their craft.

By working with someone who knows multiple tools at disposal, you save money, time, and disappointment on strategies that are obvious misses.

The contractors I work with have at least 5 years of working experience with their craft. (Well, less with retargeting and social media, as those advertising channels were made available in 2010).

However, as I anticipate a lot of people are going to be visiting this website, I don't want the case studies to be bombarded unnecessarily. After all, they have their own businesses to run. In addition, they also don't want their competitors snooping around the Internet, copying their strategies.

So the names have been left out of the website due to this consideration.

If we end up having a strategy session, and we have a good fit, then I'll supply the case studies.

Speaking of which, it's a perfect time to ask you to sign up for a strategy session again.

I applaud you for taking the time to read this page from beginning to end.

If you decide to fill in the gaps yourself, even after the strategy session, I wish you the best. Let me know how things are going.

Our marketing efforts will reach a ton of businesses. Even if you want to hire us, you're likely competing with other firms within your area as well. Once we sign on let's say a plumber in Chicago, we won't be taking on any more clients within a 30 mile radius for ethical and non-compete reasons. So do keep this in mind.

If you prefer to contact us directly rather than signing up onto the email list, use this contact form instead.

Stanley Lee

Founder

P.S. If you've skipped ahead to the end of this page, or forgot what I said, let me recap. I walked you through why figuring out digital marketing is important, how most businesses deal with this, and a run-down of the main tools at your disposal. If you're even remotely interested to have a smart experienced mind working on this, shoot us an email or call us at 818-254-8881.