The first commandment for technology and marketing should be “do what works.” I spent over a decade in tech companies and after being in so many different environments, I finally realize–it is all relative to success. One company spent over a million dollars on marketing and hired a team of a dozen engineers to build a website. Today, “solopreneurs” are running businesses off their MacBooks. And many local businesses are still thinking…maybe I should have a web site.
All businesses need leads. The concept of using the Internet to generate interest in your business and get people finding and calling you is called inbound marketing–an idea operationalized by the company HubSpot in Cambridge. I think they have a great business plan and a great idea for companies that are ready to dive in. But frankly, their platform and service (at $750/month plus the time to manage it all) is a hard sell for people who think…maybe I should have a web site.
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The real challenge is to do enough that works to learn if you should do more. Nobody has the risk tolerance to invest thousands of dollars in paying someone to help them “go online”…those who are willing to do that will do it on their own time, by self-educating and because they are excited about learning about online and social media. That leaves a gap (I hope Dave Atkins Media can fill) to provide some basic starting point for evaluating whether more time and money is worth investing. Pay-as-you-go marketing is what people do when they don’t have $20 million of venture capital funding behind a wacky new idea and they just want to see if they can get more clients by having a web site.