SEO alone is useless.
You might get traffic, but it won’t compel people to trust you and buy anything.
Social media is great for making relationships.
But relationships don’t always translate into dollar signs.
All of these tactics are good. But they don’t work very well on their own.
The best marketing is integrated. And great marketing can give you a true competitive advantage.
Great marketing isn’t about tactics. It doesn’t really matter which ones you use. They always depend on your unique circumstance.
No matter which ones you choose, they have to be integrated.
Because if they aren’t, then your business will never have great marketing.
And if you don’t have great marketing, then your days are numbered.
Here’s why.
Why You Need a Moat Around Your Business
Warren Buffet isn’t just a great investor.
He’s a brilliant business strategist.
He didn’t become one of the world’s richest people by buying stocks and bonds over E-Trade.
He builds wealth through buying businesses.
When evaluating companies, one of things he always looks for is a moat around the business.
No matter what industry, you need to have a moat around your company to be successful in the long-run.
A moat surrounds a castle (company), and makes it extremely difficult for invaders (competitors) to siege and overthrow.
In other words, it’s a real, defensible competitive advantage that protects and insulates the company from competition.
Great online marketing can be a moat around your business.
Here’s how.
Capitalizing on Early Wins
When you’re just getting started in marketing, you’ll probably find one or two great tactics.
You’ll get some early wins, and start to make some real money.
Finding tactics that work well is difficult because they’re always changing. So you stick with what you know.
But there’s a problem.
If you rely on one tactic too heavily, then you could be at a major risk.
What happens if that one tactic suddenly doesn’t work.
Then what do you do?
How Competition Crushes the Playing Field
One of the biggest threats to your business comes from competition.
Because when competition adopts a new tactic, they make it much more expensive to compete.
For example, let’s say your business relies heavily on Google AdWords.
You spend a large amount each month to acquire new leads. The competition hasn’t noticed this new opportunity, so the cost per click is reasonable and you can make a nice profit.
The problem is that one day they will catch on, and your cost per click will skyrocket. Now you might be priced out of the market.
If the cost to acquire each customer becomes more than the lifetime value of that customer, then you’ll start losing money on each new customer or client.
You can’t fix this problem with more volume. In fact, it will only get worse.
You have a fundamental problem with your business model, and you’re heading for bankruptcy.
This is just one example. But it works the same with every marketing channel you choose.
When you adopt new technologies, you’ll always have a brief window of opportunity. Large companies are slow to react. They have a lot of internal bottlenecks, and don’t like to accept change.
But when they catch on and dive in, they have enough money to level the playing field.
So your main source for getting business is literally wiped out overnight.
Now what do you do?
How to Build a Thriving Company that Lasts for Decades
One of the keys to any business is to consistently make more money.
That means you need more leads, and more sales.
At the end of the day, your revenue needs to keep increasing because of the additional demand generated.
Great marketing fuels that demand.
But that doesn’t happen with one tactic alone. Great marketing isn’t about SEO or Facebook.
You can’t point to any one type of advertisement or specific promotion that will consistently bring you more business for years to come.
The only way to do that is to integrate your tactics under a good strategy.
How Content Marketing Supports SEO and Social Media
Content marketing is fundamental to online marketing.
But now there’s too much of it. Content has suddenly become a commodity.
That’s why bad content doesn’t cut it anymore. It will be useless and ignored. If you’re going to do something, then you might as well do it right.
Because when you “do it right”, it works day and night to create more demand.
It becomes the backbone of a marketing asset that consistently brings you more business.
For example, your blog archive becomes a library of information that appreciates in value over time.
How?
- People share your content for you and expose it to a wider audience.
- This sharing and citing will create inbound links that makes you more authoritative to search engines, which leads to better rankings.
- The new increased awareness helps bring in more traffic through people looking for your brand, referrals from others and search engines.
- You begin to become more credible as more people have good experiences and leave positive recommendations.
- Conversion rates start to improve because people begin to trust you.
Content marketing now becomes the backbone of your lead generation. And when you’re “doing it right”, it works together with SEO and social media to create an integrated approach.
Now you have a moat around your business. You have a defensible lead gen system that consistently creates more demand and gets you more sales month after month.
That’s great marketing.
A competitor may be better than you at SEO, or they may spend a lot more money buying Facebook fans.
But they won’t beat you in the long run.
They might win a battle or two, but they won’t win the war.
It’s too difficult to fight a war on multiple fronts (like Content + SEO + Social)… especially when you have a defensible position.
Your size and focus now becomes an asset, because it takes a tight, orchestrated effort to execute this properly.
When you have a solid game plan and strategically pick tactics that work really well together, you’ll build a sustainable source for generating more business.
But if you just stay in your comfort zone, or start trying the latest shiny tactics and tools that you read about in Mashable, then you’re going to lose every time.