Feb
19
The newspaper’s swansong and what you must do to avoid going down with the old media when they die
Filed Under Online Marketing
If you love leafing through your favourite newspaper over a cup of coffee, enjoy it while you can!
In an interview last week, Rachel Money asked Seth Godin how could newspapers become successful online businesses and Seth took the opportunity to predict that the printed rag will become obsolete sooner than we might expect - just like cassette tapes and floppy disks.
In Seth’s own words:
“Newspapers are going to go out of business in the next ten years all around the world. There are two problems in the United States newspaper industry. One is that you make a living from cutting down lots of trees, making the paper and hiring trucks to deliver the newspapers to stores. That’s not how information travels anymore.”
“The second problem is that newspapers make their money from classified ads. Now those ads work better and cost less online so I think there’s no question that there will be organizations like newspapers, but they’re not going to be in paper form. The sooner that people who make newspapers realize that and get into a different business the happier they’re going to be. They need to concentrate all their efforts online.”
The thing is that no matter how much you may love holding an actual newspaper in your hands, newspapers are more about the news and less about the paper - and in our information age, that news has been available online for hours, and is inevitably out of date, by the time the stacks of dailies hit the shelves.
And no, you won’t have to carry around your laptop to read the latest news at the beach! Emerging gadgets like the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader - with their capability to store hundreds of books, download the latest news and stuff via wireless and show it all on a display that uses the patented E-ink technology to give an eyestrain-free paper look - are a taste of things to come as print media exits stage left in the very near future.
What does this mean for your business?
Even if you don’t run a newspaper, the increasing shift to online media is already affecting the way your customers consume information, and consequently, the advertising methods you have to use if you want to reach them. Seth Godin’s advice to newspaper publishers to get out while they can also applies to everyone who relies on the old media for their advertising.
If that’s you, or if your current view of a website is a kind of static digital brochure that once created will last you for the next so many months or years, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that you have a whole world of online marketing and advertising possibilities to discover - a myriad of ways to promote your business better and more efficiently. The bad news? Simply that if you don’t embrace these new technologies, you run a very real risk of being left behind and losing out to your more savvy competitors. But no bad news is really bad if it is perfectly avoidable, is it?
So let’s take a look at a few ways how you can lever the Internet to your marketing advantage today.
1) Give your customers regular fresh new content
Your website is the perfect way to get all the latest information to the masses instantly. This sounds obvious, but few businesses really take advantage of the opportunity to publish on the cheap that blogs and content management systems offer. Not only is this an excellent way to encourage visitors to return to your website, but the search engines love fresh information too!
2) Engage in dialogue with your audience
Marketers would give anything to find out what’s on the mind of their prospects. Now you can! Your blog and website comment forms can be an excellent platform for your customers to voice their opinion and tell you what they think of your business. After all, if you don’t know, you cannot improve, can you?
3) Test and track your website performance
You don’t have to have the perfect website right off the bat - and that’s in fact impossible! Look at your website as something you can test and improve. With applications like Google Analytics (which happens to be free) you can find out how different pages and elements of your website are performing and test different versions in real-time. That way, you build on what works and your website evolves and improves in a series of increments based on what works.
4) Run a targeted pay-per-click advertising campaign
Pay-per-click ads fall into the category of ads Seth Godin was referring to as working better and costing less online, in the quote at the top of this post. In a nutshell, they work better because you can track your ads performance in detail and improve them just like we suggested you do with your website, and they cost less because you can target your pay-per-click campaign only to the people who are likely to be interested and only pay when you get results in the form of clicks to your website.
5) Start an opt-in e-mail list
Whenever anyone contacts you through your website, offer them the opportunity to sign up to receive updates, your newsletter, or whatever value you can offer on a regular basis. As your e-mail list grows, you will have a captive audience of people who actually want to hear from you and you’ll be all set to engage in what Seth Godin calls Permission Marketing. Read all about it in Seth’s book (hint: it’s not the same thing as spamming your mailing list with ads).
6) Embrace and use ‘new’ technologies
Many of the so-called ‘new’ technologies like video and audio are as old as TV and radio, but now you too can become your own producer with a simple camera or microphone and little else. In a recent post we discussed how estate agents can easily stand out with a simple video presentation of their properties that takes next to no skills to make. Even better, come up with some innovative idea that might go viral like the famous Will It Blend? videos that spread like wildfire and have been seen by millions on YouTube.
And that’s by no means an exhaustive list of the ways you can be using your website and the Internet to get more business faster. Want to know more? Contact expert internet marketers Sorted Sites now to discuss how you can make the most of your online presence!
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