Do You Make This Mistake When Marketing Your Small Business?

There has been a paradigm shift in the way business is carried out over the last 15 years. We are only just beginning to appreciate the extent of the opportunities that are opening up to us. Can you guess what it is?

I refer, of course, to the internet.

On 26th May 1995, Bill Gates of Microsoft, wrote his famous ‘Internet Tidal Wave’ memo to his staff when he realised that his business had not fully appreciated the opportunities that were beginning to unfold. That was just 15 years ago.

In the UK broadband connections only took off in around 2000. The development of faster download and upload speeds is now central to using the internet with the increasing output of videos and other digitial media.

I think that many small businesses still do not appreciate just how to leverage the internet. Some realise that they must get online and decide to pay someone to build a website for them. Often this investment of time and money is relatively low because they cannot quite see how to generate money from such an investment.

I can readily understand the fear of venturing into a new paradigm with only limited knowledge. There are plenty of people only too ready to trade on our technical ignorance.

For example, when I was running a manufacturing company, I used to get cold calls from companies promising to get my business on the 1st page of Google. Most of these promises were completely worthless because the keywords that they want to rank for had little or no traffic.

Also as a small business, the building of a website on your behalf without having the ability to post your own content is, in my opinion, not recommended. The time and cost of keeping the website fresh and up-to-date when working through a third party, is a barrier to your business.

To fully realise the potential of trading your business online, I feel that the business owner needs to be directly involved. It’s a bit like finance and bookkeeping, you cannot fully delegate this function. You need to have some understanding of it to be able to engage intelligently with the people to whom you have delegated the job.

It is becoming increasingly clear that in one way or another, every business will in future need to leverage the internet in some way in order to remain competitive.

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