Marketing Takes So Much … Everything!

We know that you’re aware of the many benefits you can see from marketing (especially when it’s handled in a strategic manner!). Perhaps you know how important it is to establish your brand, connect with your target market, and make sure you can be found online.

And if you are aware of all that, you’ll likely understand this:

Marketing is an investment, not an expense.

Now, when you read that, there’s a fairly decent chance you associated it in the context of financial investments and expenses. Most people would interpret it this way at first glance.

Here’s the thing, though—we’re talking about more than just money here – your investment also includes time and energy.

Basically, you need to decide where to place your resources and, taking this a step further, ultimately make the call as to whether you’re going to try and go at it alone, hire an employee, or seek expert help.

Why Do You Need to Invest Anything for Marketing?

One way or another, marketing requires an investment – and the fact is, marketing is more complicated than ever before, especially in our modern world.

Think about it like this:

Just about everything in life has pros and cons.

When it comes to modern marketing, the biggest “pro” is that this can be so much more effective than the “spray and pray” tactics of yore. You now have the ability to target your ads to people who are actually looking up relevant keywords—thereby expressing obvious interest in the product or service you offer.

That beats the heck out of putting an ad on TV or in the newspaper and hoping your ideal customer will see it and decide to choose your brand.

The flipside of the coin is that marketing is more essential than it’s ever been.

Okay, so why’s that the case?

Because everyone looks for everything online.

In turn, that means you need your company’s website to perform well in search engine rankings. After all, how often do you venture past the first one or two pages when looking up products and services online?

Probably not too often.

That might not be so bad in and of itself, except for the search engines—and especially Google—constantly changing the rules on all of us.

When they make algorithm changes, it affects how your website performs. So it’s in your interest to stay current with what Google (and others) is deeming to be best current practices.

If that’s not enough (and most would think it is), you should probably spend time being mindful of what’s happening in the social media and email marketing worlds as well.

We’re incline to think the vast amounts of time and energy it takes to keep up with all of that makes it pretty clear as to why you need to make marketing a top investment in your business.

Beyond Time

But let’s put that time issue aside for a moment and change our focus:

Do you even have the right tools?

Do you even know how much expertise is needed for an effective marketing strategy? What you should do with social media and how to properly link content? How to improve your local SEO results … or even what local SEO results are in the first place? What about Reputation Management? How do you take care of that?

Sure, it’s one thing to have enough time to invest in keeping up with the constantly changing practices and demands of modern marketing; it’s quite another to possess the right skills and training to actually do them.

And, if you’re reading this blog, the odds are quite good you are an intelligent business leader, which means you know how to find and utilize resources.

The thing about that, though, is there are so many resources out there for both learning about and implementing marketing practices.