What!! Just to please your engine...??

We find that it's almost an obsession with our new clients. It seems that the only thing they want is more Facebook "Likes". They seem to think that the only way to get new customers through their door is to get their website to the top of the SEO tree. They will tell us that we've got to get those "Likes" up; gotta create great content; gotta engage that audience; gotta get that website into the top 10 Google ratings.

It can be surprisingly difficult to get them to accept the truth and understand the real work and purpose of marketing...!

We tell them that of course we can help with their social media activities. Creating engaging content and placing it in front of potential customers is an important part of what we do as a marketing company. But if you think that's the only reason to do marketing, then you've missed the point. If you think that the only reason to do marketing is to please your search engine so your website comes out top of the Google ratings, then again, you've missed the point. 

The point is that you do business with people, not search engines.

Read that sentence above again. It says, "Creating engaging content and placing it in front of potential customers is an important part of what we do..."

The operative words here are, "important PART...". Consistent & persistent posting of quality content will certainly help to locate new customers, and it will help those people actually searching for the service you provide, to find you. Obviously, your potential customers must be able to scroll and find you easily.

Content creation and posting to a media platform, be it on-line or hard copy to newspapers, is "Passive Marketing". Passive marketing creates the virtual space in which your business operates. It's a bit like decorating a room, then opening the door. If you stand outside with the door shut you have no idea what type of room it is. As soon as you open the door and look in, you know what it is.

But, does decorating your virtual space actually get people to come inside? The truthful answer is "No, not really". Passive marketing tells people what to expect if they visit, but doesn't give them a reason to go to the trouble of making that visit. This is why passive marketing is about 20% of the work we do as a marketing company.

By far the most important job of any reputable marketing company is to create "Active Marketing", to provide opportunities for "Positive Selling" and to facilitate direct invitations for customers to visit your business.

Let me just repeat this. 80% or 4/5 of our work is about creating Active Marketing.

An example of active marketing would be to create an event to which you or your supplier can directly invite people to attend. An example of positive selling would be to reward those people who visit, with a reward for taking the trouble.

To put it another way, active marketing is marketing that gets up off its' chair and interacts with real people, because your customers are real people, not search engines...