Now, what do I mean by times are changing? I mean that the whole system of marketing and doing business and advertising is changing and you need to ask yourself –am I keeping up?
I do not want you to come back in a few years and say ” Well, Jon you did not tell us. You did not say it was going to happen that quick” because it is really quick. Stuff accelerates.
It is almost logarithmic. There are numbers out there that tell of back in the older days when they first had radios, it took umpteen years to get to 50 millions listeners or something like that.
Then Instagram appeared and it took about one year or two years to reach that kind of number. But think back in the old days and by the old days, it is not that long ago.
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The advertising was for big companies. Big companies, big budgets and what do they do? They put ads on the TV. They put billboards up. They put large ads in newspapers and things like that and on the radio but it was for them.
It was expensive, ridiculously expensive and it is exclusively for big companies. The rest of us would not have a chance. However, small companies took out small ads in little tiny publications and that was their domain.
If you turn to the back of a specialist trade publication, there would be pages of little tiny ads explaining their little benefit and hoping to catch the eye with different colored print or something like that and this is the way it went until along came the internet.
Now, the internet started to level the playing field. A lot of people are of an old generation and have been in business for long time and did not want to learn new things and said “Oh, I hope it passes” but it did not.
The internet brought us banner ads. For awhile, they were on top of everything. If anyone can remember Yahoo and Excite, and Altavista and all that before Google plus.
If you are going to search for anything they are plastered with banner ads but eventually they got blind to those and then thanks to Google, the next big thing was search engine optimization.
Now, they tell you this — if you did some little tricks and put some pieces in the back end on your site you could possibly get to the top ranking in Google — but eventually all that was squashed when they brought out their panda, and the penguin, and the hummingbird, algorithm and changes and filters because everything you have been thought to do, you did not do anymore.
It did not work anymore and if you done it then, generally you will will wind up being penalized and you will be put back in a worse position than before you started but that had enable a lot of smaller companies to compete with the larger companies.
Now, then came social media, bless its little heart. Social media is not really a thing. It is just the way the internet is evolving. It is a way that we communicate.
All of this marketing communications through radio, television, internet, social media, smart phones, and things like that are an evolution of the internet. The reason I am saying this is because a lot of us do not like social media.
It is just impossible to get a heads around because there is so many out there — Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google plus, Instagram, and then other ones you may not even of heard of like Tumblr, Medium and all these.
Of course, don’t forget sites like YouTube, and Fitblr, and Vime. They come up with new ones all the time.
What about apps like WhatsApp and Snapchat. How do we use that for marketing? So, it is all too much. It gets to us. A lot of us do not start anywhere but what I want to remind you is this — please start with something.
Please pick a social media channel and get to enjoy it, even if you do not enjoy it, find someone else who does because when I am here in a cafe up in the mountain and all the kids have their smart phones out and they are texting and snapchatting their friends and whatever.
These kids who are 16, 17 they are our customers in the future. Do you ever hear of any kids say about emailing their friends? No, they do not use email and they hardly ever actually use a phone.
Have you ever seen a kid with a phone that is talking? It is all done with fingers on a keypad. This is how they communicate. Are they using twitter? Are they using Snapchat? Are they using WhatsApp?
Who knows but we need to figure it out. We need to get involved. It really is important because before you know it, three, four years time these are the people who working at companies or starting their own and they are doing the buying and their way of buying would not be what you are used to.
If your business is still in the old world you are going be on a slippery slope very quickly. So, please get a handle, pick something. Not sure what to pick? It really depends on your business.
If you are in a fashion or a visual business then something like Instagram or Pinterest is probably the thing for you. If you are in a fast moving business, Twitter. I would actually recommend getting in to Twitter. If you want to use Facebook, you are going to pay to advertise.
Do not bother wasting your time putting up a big following on the free side, just pay. But if you have to keep up with some things that are coming out, Google Plus is good, because it helps your search engines optimization.
It helps because Google owns all of that stuff — even YouTube which is always, always going to work but if you ask me? I would say start with Twitter, and get the hang of that and them move in to something else.
Tuesday Toolbox Tip
It is a Tuesday and have I got a tool box tip for you. This is great and I have to give props to Regina from byregina.com, or Regic as she likes to be known.
This is a free tool. It is from a website but you download it in to chrome as a browser extension. It is called Grammarly.
What it does is it checks your grammar and your spellings and your sentence formats. it checks for Commas, apostrophes, things like that, capitalization as you type.
You can actually open a little window in it and type out if you are writing something in that and it will check it. It is rather clever .
It also works with Gmail. Once you have downloaded it in the chrome browser it will give you this little green G down in the corner and it checks your emails as you go. It is really, really, clever .
Click here to instantly download our FREE Book
“The 71 Ultimate Marketing Tools”
It has called out a huge grammar mistake that I have made that I did not even know why I was making!
So, apologies for all those mistakes I have made for years before I discovered Grammarly.
It really is worth checking out. Anyway, remember choose your social media. Get in there. Get started before it is too late. Go check out Grammarly. I will see you soon!
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What do you need to do to make sure you are keeping up?
