The Guide to The Working The Web Universe

Courtesy of  Wikipedia

By Hector Cisneros

There is a universe of marketing choices for the business owner today. Gone are the days when you could do just Print, Radio, TV or billboard advertising. The internet changed all that. In fact, the Internet has forced conventional analog media, once considered the foundational platforms for advertising, to adapt and join the internet or die. Today the internet is the space that marketers need to make their advertising work. But the choices are many, and the landscape is filled with tricks, scams and large advertising players who are constantly changing the game. So as a business owner, who do you trust, how do you make the right choices and most importantly, how do you know if you’re getting a good return for your marketing dollar? Well, this episode of Working the Web to Win will delve deep into Marketing In Cyberspace to help business owners make sense of the Working the Web Universe.

Cyberspace is Now the Premier Advertising Space

Cyberspace has almost an unlimited number of advertising venues to choose from. There’s Google, Yahoo, Bing, the three big players in search and pay per click marketing. There is Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest and a slew of others in the social media area. Of course, we have all the old media companies taken up shop on the internet, including ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox. Knowing that broadcast TV wants to keep control of the video arena, Google and Facebook are both spending billions to wrestle away their dominance. You also have big players like Netflix and Hulu plus a slew of movie production companies like HBO making waves as well. Most radio stations also have live streaming feeds and podcasts on the internet. Almost all news and magazine print companies have an online version of their analog products. Even billboards are moving to update via the internet.

Courtesy of Pixabay

However, the internet did something that the old media companies could not pull off. The internet was ready made for the integration of multiple types of media (aka multimedia). For example; Blogs (today's modern version of magazines for the masses) can provide, textual content along with images, illustration, photographs, videos, music, and podcasts of various types. They can provide brochures, links to other resources and can even provide direct sales opportunities so that consumers can buy as they learn about a product or service.

Also, the internet has flipped the control of marketing from advertiser to consumer control. In the old days, advertising was a one-way communications medium. You could not directly communicate with advertisers. Social media have changed all of that. Today, the emperor has no clothes. No longer can a product or service be hyped into top sales position if it does not provide real value to the consumer. Bad products and poor customer service are met with scorn, derision and public social backlash that quickly kills bad products. Good and bad testimonials, ratings and rankings rule the social media roost. This puts the consumer in charge of what is bought, sold, liked and share all over the world.

A Multitude of Choices

Courtesy of  Pixabay

Part of the problem with the internet is that you have so many choices. You can engage in blogging, social media, pay per click, banner ads, backlink exchanges, Digital PR, video marketing, video banners, WebTV shows, Internet radio shows, podcasting, webinars, email blasts, email newsletters, directory listings, SEO and Organic search just to name a few. The choices and vendors seem endless. However, having lots of choices provides competition, and that is a silver lining that the once dominant broadcast TV industry did not provide.

Today, a business owner can have a wide variety of Internet properties that are basically free to use at their disposal. Most of the social media platforms are free to use. They make their money by selling targeted advertising to business customers. Subscribers, including business users, pay virtually nothing to join the social network. Subscribers willingly provide their personal information and social media companies like Facebook sells access to the information via targeted marketing.

Now you can Reach Billions Instead of Millions

Courtesy of Wikipedia

 Another thing the internet did that TV, Radio, Print and other media could not do, was to accomplish a ubiquitous worldwide reach. Even network TV could only reach about 100 million viewers at a time. The internet can reach billions of viewers, and its programming is not based on an hourly schedule, but a view on demand model. And this brings me to my point. The internet is a humongous connection to hundreds of thousands of TV channels. These channels are all audience-driven. The most important thing a business owner can do is find the right audience. More specifically, they need to build their own audience, so they are not solely dependent on the large internet marketing venues like Google or Facebook. They are not stuck in the constant pay to play trap, where if they don’t buy an ad that day, nothing happens, and the phone doesn’t ring.  If they build their own audience, they can leverage this to produce much more cost effective traffic. Traffic to their websites, blogs, social and video sites, yes, all their internet properties. Granted, they must spend either time, energy and or money to build this audience, but once built, it lowers the cost of marketing. It does not make marketing cost go away; it lets you leverage your business asset (your audience) to acquire sales at a much lower cost.

Now, these sales are predicated on the fact that you have a good product or service, that they are providing good customer services and that they are treating customers in an honest, fair and equitable way. In short, you are providing a valued service along with the product or service you sell. Blogging, producing and publishing videos and podcasts, as well as sharing this information via social post is a great way to add value to your company.  What’s valuable about a blog is that it can be the centerpiece of your web universe. A blog can inform, entertain, disseminate, inspire and move a person to action while showing off the variety of subjects worth viewing. It can provide links to a multitude of other articles all in a multimedia format. It can give people a reason to come back again and again because there is always new content, something your website can’t do by itself. Plus, you own all the content, there are no competitors on your blog just you, all day all the time. A blog is a great way to build trust and credibility with your customers and prospects.

Content is Not King

Courtesy of  Max Pixel

Today you often hear the phrase Content is King. Well, the real fact is this. Only high quality and authoritative content is king. Also, your content needs to be relevant, timely, useful, be accurate, and entertaining (verse boring). On top of that, this content must find a channel to reach the masses. The internet is riddled with high-quality blogs, video channels and internet radio shows with few readers or listeners. Basically, they are billboards in the internet desert. Building a big audience and having a means of distributing your content to that audience is critical to your success. This is the only reason marketers still buy TV, Radio and print media advertising space; it can still offer a relatively large audience (although in most cases, at a much higher price for your return on investment). At Working the Web to Win, we have spent a lot of our time, energy and resources building our audience. Currently, we have over 80,000 Twitter followers and another 30,000 followers across several other social networks that we own or manage. Because this is a social media audience, we can push out our messages and reach a relatively big following in a relatively short period of time. For example; our blog receives on average over 30,000+ page views a month. Our articles are read locally and worldwide. We often post our videos, podcasts and other multimedia elements in our articles to make sure they are of high production value. This also ensures that the articles are of the highest quality we can provide.

Do More for a Lot Less

Courtesy of Flickr

Having said that, we believe that the average business is discovering that it can do so much more on the internet for so much less and still achieve a better result that using old style media. For example; you can have your own internet radio show for as little as $40 a month (see BlogTalkRadio). This does not include the scriptwriting, production labor or airtime cost. If you compare this to an analog radio station, your cost is far less. We have been quoted prices in the range of $$400 to 1,500 for a one-hour local radio show. This means your media buy is between $1,600 and $6,000 a month minimum. This does not include scriptwriting or talent either, but it does offer some promo spots, and you can sell air time to offset some of your cost. If you just want to run ads, 60-second spots generally run in the $50 to $150 per ad airing. You need to run at least 20 ads to get any reach and impact. This cost is determined by the airtime and audience size. This means that you will spend between $1,000 and $3,000 on your campaign in one month. You may also have ad production costs as well.

Doing your own internet TV show usually costs very little. YouTube and Facebook both provide free live streaming service. You will have to master the technical production skills, and you may even have to buy some video production software and hardware, but other than that, your only ongoing cost is script writing, talent and time. Broadcast TV is an even more expensive per minute of air time. A five-minute infomercial on a midday TV show will run between $500 and $1000 each spot. These shows often come with some promos like online banners and short promo ads as well. It’s important to note that broadcast TV ad’s also have a higher production cost than radio and the cost per ad depends on the airtime and audiences as well.   It's common to have your TV Ad campaign run $3,000 To $10,000 a month unless your airtime is late night shows or it’s run during other low viewer programming.

Courtesy of Pixabay

In most cases, Radio, TV and Print media do not provide exclusivity. If you want exclusivity, you must pay a lot extra (like twice as much). Because of this, it's not uncommon to see back to back ads of competitors run on Radio and TV. Flip a page in the newspaper and your competitor is staring you and your customers in the face. This does not mean we don’t approve of using TV, Radio, or print advertising. In fact, we do use these advertising mediums. However, we make sure that we are tracking the results from these programs and we make sure that the client’s return on investment is profitable and appropriate. If not, we move the clients' media buys into something that is producing a good return.

Streaming Allows you to Achiever Simultaneous Leverage

We have found that the internet allows you to leverage several of the streaming mediums simultaneously. For example; You could be doing your live internet radio show and stream it live on YouTube or Facebook as well. We write a blog article for each show, instead of writing a script. We then push out the blog to our social followers, then use the blog as the script for the live shows. We stream the shows live and encourage our audience to tune in and participate by calling in and asking questions. Once the shows have aired, we recycle them and push them out again as a podcast and videocast to all our social nets. This becomes a self-perpetuating system which grows our audience, our positive reputation and builds our credibility as a marketing company. Over time our production cost has gone down because we have turned this process into a system that we now share with our clients.

Spend a Little, Get A lot

Courtesy of WorkingtheWebtoWin.com

We have clients where we produce internet radio and WebTV show, that include all the items we deem necessary. This usually includes; script writing, weekly 1000-word blog articles, all social media support (posting to the top 4 social nets daily), all production and post-production, publication works for both the internet, radio and WebTV show, multiple banner ads, live and on off air promos, plus pay per click advertising. We can provide all of this for as little as $3,900 a month, turnkey. If additional talent is needed, we will provide this talent for as little as $200 per hour. To make this even a sweeter deal for the client, they own all the content. The blog articles, the Internet Radio Show Podcast, the WebTV cast, the social sites, etc. When you engage a broadcast TV or Radio station, they will normally let you copy your shows, but they own the content, not you. Also, they only provide minimal push marketing, no daily social posts, scriptwriting or uploading their content. You must do that yourself. Also, once you stop using them, your content soon goes dark and is replaced with the next advertiser. With our system, you receive permanent, evergreen, high-quality content that is yours to keep and use over and over again. Buy it once and keep using it for years. It will never go dark unless you want it to.

In this article, I have discussed our philosophy of why the internet is the center of the marketing universe today. I discussed how the internet is like a huge TV conduit with hundreds of thousands of channels with worldwide reach. Further, this article explains why finding your target audience and building a loyal following is your paramount concern.  I have also explained why we believe that blogging is the centerpiece of internet marketing. This article shows how blogging can be used to provide a true multimedia approach to content creation, distribution and audience building when coupled with social media follower development.

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If you feel your business could use some help with its marketing, contact us at 904-410-2091 or fill out the form in the sidebar of this blog, we will provide a free marketing analysis to help you get better results. If you found this article useful, please share it with friends, family, and co-workers. I recommend reading, "The Physic of Marketing - Analogies for the 21st Century" ,  "The Three Phases of Successful Marketing" and "Marketing 101 – What you need to Know before Buying Advertising" for a comprehensive view. You can find other articles on our blog by typing in “marketing or advertising” in the search box at the top of this blog. Also, check out the “Blog Talk Radio, Internet podcast, that goes with this article ” and the Show Note Page, it has, even more, links for you to check out.  If you have a useful comment or opinion related to this article, leave it in the comment section of this blog.  Also, don’t forget to plus us, on Google+.

Hector Cisneros is COO and Director of Social Media Marketing at Working the Web to Win, an award-winning Internet marketing company based in Jacksonville, Florida.  He is also co-host of the weekly Internet radio show, "Working the Web to Win" on BlogTalkRadio.com, which airs every Tuesday at 4 p.m. Eastern. Hector is a syndicated writer and published author of “60 Seconds to Success.”

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