Are you looking for a guarantee? Something for sure. Something you can count on. We have a guarantee. It says we will place your business website on the first page of Google within seven days of submitting your application or your money back or you get the month free, your choice! Does that guarantee sound like a guarantee you could live with?
There are several uses of the word “guarantee” in today’s parlance. It could be an agreement by which one person undertakes to secure another in the possession or enjoyment of something. Or it could be the assurance of quality or the length of use to be expected from a product offered for sale. So a guarantee is an assurance of a specific outcome.
Every business needs to have exposure on the web in today’s marketing environment. In the last 15 years, the internet has changed completely the way we do business. Roadblocks like the declining market in the print advertising world, the DoNotCall phone list, and the strict spamming laws are constricting where and how we can get our message out. Two thirds of people go on the internet to find their local business. And they search because they intend to buy.
What do they find when they get there? 44% of small businesses in the US do not even have a website. And if they do have a website, most have no strategy to drive traffic to it. They don’t have the site optimized for search engines and worst of all, they don’t have the time or training to figure it all out.
So what is the small business owner to do? That’s where we come in. Businesses want to be on the web to attract local business, they want it affordable, they want it easy and, guess what, they want it guaranteed.
Let me give you a couple of scenarios and see what guarantee you would like to have when building your presence on the web. Let’s compare internet advertising to advertising on a billboard. That’s a little easier to get your mind around than imaging the 30 billion searches on the web. Would you like to be guaranteed your ad would show up on that specific billboard all the time, every day, for one flat fee? Sounds pretty good, right? Now suppose that billboard is on Hwy. 2 in the most rural area you can imagine with one car per day for traffic. Oops, it was guaranteed, wasn’t it? And you got what you paid for.
Now we know advertising on the internet isn’t like that. It’s more like a billboard on the busiest stretch of highway in New York City. Well, to get that guarantee to have your ad on that billboard every day, all day for one flat rate just isn’t affordable for most of us. And besides, just how many people could be on the first page of Google at one time anyway.
So we take that busy billboard site and put multiple ads on it. We guarantee your ad will be seen every day at some point. No one can tell you exactly when with the millions of clicks every minute going on but you can feel a lot more sure that it will be seen by lots of people than that billboard on Hwy. 2.
So give that some thought when planning your next advertising campaign. Watch out for the real ‘guarantees’ and don’t let what you want something to be to get in the way of looking at the facts.
