Marketing is Changing and Your Business Needs to Change with it to Survive!!!

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

Is Marketing Changing?

Without a doubt marketing is changing. But more importantly the platforms that we use to market change dramatically over the last few years and many businesses are still stuck in a  time capsule.

Newspaper Marketing is Struggling

If you think that  you can still throw money at newspaper ads hoping to get the same amount of business that you always had in the past, you are living in that time capsule. Today people commonly refer to newspapers as “Yesterday’s News”. Why would anyone want to read yesterday’s news? They wouldn’t, hence the problem why newspapers like the “Rocky Mountain News” who has been in business for over 150 years, is closing their doors.  They are far from being alone. A lot of the big newspaper companies across the country are struggling just to stay open. But they are only one of the marketing platforms that is dying due to internet, social media and the age of digital coupons.

How about Marketing in the Phone Books?

Before you put an expensive marketing ad in the phone book, please ask yourself two questions.

Question Number One… When was the last time you picked up a phone book to look up a phone number?

Question Number Two… What do you have against trees?

You might also ask yourself the old Clint Eastwood cliche “Do you feel lucky?”  Once upon a time there used be only one book to choose from. Now there are several phone books in each town and all of them claim to have the same distribution numbers. Who cares how many people they distribute to if no one is going to read it anyway?? OK; let me back up for a second. I have to correct myself. In over 10 years of saying that I have run into one lady and only one who told me she reads the phone book from cover to cover.

If you choose the wrong phone book for your marketing you could end up here….

I can remember when I lived in Orlando, FL and came home from work only to see a very large plastic bag filled with something at my front door. I could barely lift the bag to find it full of new phone books. Six of the phone books went to the recycling bin and one come in our home and I never opened it once. But it made me wonder where did all of those other phone books go. Businesses were paying hard earned money for a marketing ad in those books each and every month for a  full year. It seems that they have a phone book grave yard of sorts. We hope that they all go there but as you can image most just end up in the trash. Even after cities efforts to put out special dumpsters each year, around phone book season, just to pick up your phone books you don’t want so they can recycle them. I shudder to imagine just how many trees it takes to supply Orlando, FL along with phone books that probably never get read.

So what kind of marketing is working?

Good news is that there are literally thousands of ways to market your business over the internet and the best part of it all….it is a  lot less expensive than the old traditional ways of marketing and you can reach more people faster.

We will talk about a lot of those ways in future posts but, for now, I will leave you with a taste of just one way you should be looking at.

Digital Marketing Solutions

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