Every business owner and company director wants to do online marketing – very often simply because “everyone else is doing it”. Very few people are actually stopping to make intelligent choices and ask “How effective is online marketing within my total business strategy?” and “How much internet marketing is enough?”

The longer I was in internet marketing and ecommerce, the more it became profoundly clear that if you allow yourself and your team to be consumed by online marketing, you will take your eye off the ball on other critical business areas. Far too much emphasis is placed on digital marketing, which is extremely labour intensive. Without perspective, control and smart thinking, online marketing for business can easily clog up your creative and operational arteries. And this is true even if you are an online only operation.

Consider that a print magazine ad is one size and one format. An online banner campaign to support that will most likely comprise of 10 banners of different sizes, and you’ll double that to test if the pink button or the green button works better. And then all of the different website owners have different file size limitations. And then you need to support that further with text ads for search and social media posts and a youtube video…and then you need to go into all your tools to track the results and measure performance. Crikey. Its exhausting. Is it really boosting your performance in proportion to the work? And what big mission critical business initiatives are you not doing, while all this is going on?

I’m not saying that you don’t need a website and a facebook page and to cover off on all your digital basics. Of course you do. People expect these things and they do work.  You just have to be smart about it. Put internet marketing into perspective within your overall business strategy.

For example, at one point my company facebook page had the highest amount of customer interactions in the country compared to other major retailers. Everyone was very chuffed. Except me. We were extremely tight on resources, people were being spread too thinly, and other, more critical areas of business were suffering. We got carried away because Facebook was sexy, fun and “everyone was doing it”. But why did we need to have the most customer interactions? What good was that really doing us as a business? Not enough, versus the time it cost us. It meant that customers loved us…but they would still love us if we only posted 3 times a week instead of 12. And they did. And we scored back a whole lot of time and energy with no negative impact on our customers.

We also established that our entire social media marketing strategy would come crashing down if the customer services staff weren’t appropriately trained to respond to customer queries. So the time we saved on posts, we spent training staff.

The truth is, online marketing cannot happen successfully without a traditional marketing strategy to support it. We’re seeing a shift in the market place where internet marketers are doing more traditional advertising, and at the same time, there’s a revival in consumers’ demand for human interaction. Remember that marketing isn’t just about advertising! MORE importantly, it is about product development and customer services. These are the reasons customers truly form a relationship with your business. If you are a small company, or small team, you have to focus your attention where it really counts.

I recommend you try and visually map the most important things in your business to getting and keeping customers….versus the time and money you are spending on these activities. You simply want to try and paint a picture that makes more logical sense.