Today’s Setting

When you look for information online, what do you expect to find? Whether you are looking into the health properties of green tea, where others recommend you have dinner when visiting a new town, the news, or all about a public figure, is there any information you won’t find online?

These days Google’s sophisticated search engine has ‘learned’ about more of what you are looking for, so it is instrumental in helping you find information, often completing the keywords phrases you are searching for as you type them in. In case you don’t find exactly what you’re looking for here, you can always jump onto Twitter or Facebook and ask your community for advice or insights. If you are active in social media, someone is bound to help or know where to send you.

Most Businesses Are Advertising Online

This year Google’s online advertising has officially surpassed traditional newspaper and magazine advertising, so that, as indicated by the graph, traditional advertising opportunities are decreasing. Regardless of why this is, there is less traditional advertising, which means that most people are finding out about businesses online.

Today’s Stakes

The internet has made information available and advertising is mostly done online – we know this, but what does this mean to your business?

Advertisng Is Passe

The best products or services in the world can go unseen if they aren’t advertised, since we can’t go dine at a restaurant we don’t know about. Still, social media has shifted the advertising world, asking that people share about themselves and their business. On the one hand, the exposure of advertising your business twenty-four hours a day with your website and social media is great for greeting people any time. On the other hand, no one enjoys being advertised to, which is why so many of us now have DVRs so that we can fast-forward through the commercials.

We do, however, like stories. Actually, we love them. We like fictitious stories and we also love stories about people. Perhaps we have been conditioned to learn about things in our information age, because we also love knowing about things, how they work, what is wrong, what is right and what is best. The news is a great example of our on-going love affair with stories.

This is also why magazines traditionally did so well. At one time there were magazines about everything, even small niche magazines about things most of us have never heard of. These have dwindled though, because the internet created fierce competition for books, music, news and anything else which had a print cost associated with it, and which now can be published for free virtually.

Your Online Marketing

So, we’d be more accurate to say that you can’t advertise yourself anyone, since people will tune it out and refocus online where their interest lie. We can also conclude that magazines still do exist, as a matter of fact, they have become even more niche specific, as there is a website about any topic you can think up.

In keeping up with the raised bar, we can also conclude that your business now needs to market itself, offering an online magazine about all the wonderful stories and workings of what you offer.

Although social media is still in its infancy, it is showing more and more promise for businesses every day. The more a business is active with its social media updates and blogging, the greater their following and success.

Why? Because people get to know the story, the brand and the many reasons to fall in love with the business offerings.

SMP offers social media marketing services and consulting services. Contact us today to get your businesses online magazine and marketing story started~

Graph source: http://mashable.com/2012/11/12/google-ad-revenue-passes-print-media/