As with any growing business, Emphasize Design experiences its share of growing pains. Despite them being “pains”, the more important word to draw from this is “growing”.
Only fellow business owners will appreciate the magic behind growing your very own venture. It certainly has its ups and downs, but at the end of the day, it truly is the most fulfilling experience to know that your business concept truly helps and provides value to others.
For Emphasize Design, we have the distinct pleasure of helping fellow passionate business owners grow their business ! How cool is that !?
Marketing is a significant growing pain for most companies. Everyone is looking to get the best bang for their buck, and this whole “inbound marketing” thing is new to most. It is difficult for some people to grasp the idea of the “building portion” of inbound marketing. Using traditional marketing methods, money in = said product out almost immediately (radio ad, billboards, etc.). Inbound marketing doesn’t quite work that way. Depending on the business and industry, it may take 3-6 months before you start seeing the search engine and website traffic ratings start to climb. Understandably, this can be a tough pill to swallow. However, it is absolutely a short-term-pain for long-term-gain type scenario.
Why does it take so long? Without getting too technical, basically the search engines want you and your business to prove yourself and your online marketing tactics before they start rewarding you with better rankings. Think of it like dating … you have to put in the time, build trust and learn certain things about each other before you progress to the next step, right? Same rules apply to online marketing. And, as you contribute more to the relationship and learn more and more about each other, the intensity levels increase, as do results. The more you put in, the more you’ll get out, and that’s how inbound marketing works in a nutshell. If you are the type of business who is looking for a “quicky”, then do yourself a favour (well, not really) and keep flushing money into PPC and outbound marketing tactics. But if you want to build something truly meaningful, long-lasting, and achieve ROI like you’ve never seen before, then inbound marketing is easily the best choice.
A quick side note, there is a time and place for PPC ads online. Emphasize Design will use them strategically when we want to supplement an online campaign until the inbound marketing, organic results start to increase. The downside to PPC ads is that they are extremely expensive, and as soon as you stop feeding the machine with $, everything goes away. There is no “established reputation” with PPC.
So, I challenge you. When your business approaches its next growing pain when it comes to marketing, explore the inbound marketing approach. Einstein said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. That is where the world of outbound marketing currently sits. There is nothing new that it can offer, and it is a dying breed. The time for inbound marketing is now, and we urge you and your business to join the inbound marketing revolution.
