When Does A Business Need To Have An Online Presence
In the corporate world when selecting a service provider, product, or updating company equipment etc. the practice has traditionally been to build a selection process. The process includes finding three suppliers and then checking each box from a list for the many chosen company criteria, but only if the particular supplier meets the criteria. Then add up the number of checked boxes for each supplier and the one with the most checked boxes wins. Oh, and of course we don’t care which supplier has the lowest price because that old rule of thumb – the lowest price gets the deal – was killed off by the “Quality and Service are Job One” movements of the 1980’s. Today we find an even more powerful selection criteria than lowest price selection, and best quality and service selection. Now we have the Internet. When a business goes online to find a place to purchase anything from new pens to finding UMA instruments they go to Yahoo! or MSN or Google to perform a search. They then go through the first 10 or 30 (at most) listing results until they find the provided short description that sounds most likely to be what they are searching for and they click on that one.
If you are waiting to take your business online or trying to decide if the time is right, you have two choices for your business: You can be in the first 10 listings for the products and services you provide in that Search Engine list, or you can surrender those positions to your competition.
The yellow pages like all trade catalogs that contain business listings and ads are now among the walking dead. Marketing budgets that were once used to pay for listings in these sources are instead being used to pay for Internet marketing projects. More and more businesses are leaving the traditional forms of “findability” and are now using the Internet as the primary resource for both adding new customers and maintaining current customer relations. News papers and magazine advertising revenues have continuously declined in the past 4 years while Internet marketing budgets have continuously increased over the same time line. In a report from Click Bank and Media Post the indication for lost revenues from television and radio advertising to advertising dollars spent on Internet sources is evident. (see news story).
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