If you’re not developing your own unique online content (instead of relying on linking to other peoples’ stuff), you’re already sliding down that slippery slope. And you don’t have much of anything tangible to hang on to.
The dangers of digital sharecropping.
Your company simply can’t afford to be a “digital sharecropper”: lopsidedly leaning on content properties like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, etc. Why not? Here’s one reason why not: those other sites can go away or change their content (and rules) whenever they damn well please. Your business should own—not lease—its content. Period.
Build your web home and furnish it with your own stuff.
We recently met with a couple of different prospects interested in hiring TFG to help them with their marketing efforts. One of them wants to pursue creating a direct mail campaign, complete with personalized landing pages. So far so good.
Or maybe not. In both cases, neither company has more than three scant pages of content for their web presence. And because these businesses are franchises, they each rely on their parent company’s domain and web content to beef things up.
Don’t share the sandbox with other kids.
In other words, they’re merely one of hundreds of their own competitors sharing and competing for the same content meat and traffic juice from search engines. Think of it like setting up a card table to sell your tacos—inside Taco Emporium—right alongside all the other taco peddlers. Something doesn’t smell right in Denmark, señor…and it’s not the way-past-its-expiration-date sour cream.
Yet here these guys are, feverishly posting content on Facebook. After all, that’s what a business should do right? Maybe not.
Own it. Don’t rent.
They have no home of their own. Just a leased taco stand consisting of three pages that look just like all the umpteen other taco entrepreneurs. Zzzzzzzzzzzz. Sorry, but when you’re boring, you don’t get noticed. Not in this noisy—and crowded—emporium.
And what’s even worse is that they own none of it. They’re essentially a “digital sharecropper” with some marketing content out there on the world wide (and getting wider every day) web. Although they generate and post stuff in an attempt to reach their customers and prospects, their content marketing is built on a rickety, rented card table that could easily collapse at any moment.
And now, back to our prospect.
Rather than spending their marketing dollars on a one-time event (a single direct mail campaign), what they really need is an entirely different approach. A soup-to-nuts process instead of an event (more about that in a future blog post, so stay tuned). They desperately need an ongoing marketing campaign.
But enough about them. Let’s talk about you.
Is your business caught in this same “leasing a lopsided taco” trap? Here’s how to pull yourself out.
Stake your own claim on your own turf.
Job 1: Get the heck out of your parents’ house by grabbing your own domain name and website. As impressive as TacoEmporium.com/TacoDude1074 may sound, TeddysTacoTent.com is way better. Not to mention a whole lot easier to remember.
Job 2: Next, invest in your own business with continual marketing efforts—and start by focusing on regular content marketing on your website. That way, when you launch that glossy direct-mail campaign directing folks to your site, they’ll be really stoked to find so much relevant, high-quality content. And that’s what’ll keep ’em coming back: fresh, well-written and valuable stuff.
It also allows you to start building brand equity and ownership. So WHEN (not if) the rules of the game change, you won’t be left scrounging around trying to find another emporium (and rickety card table) to lease.
Job 3: Take a few minutes and poke around our website here. And check out some of the tasty marketing strategies we’ve cooked up to help our clients develop and maintain their own super-fresh online content.
Mark my words.
“Lopsided Tacos Don’t Hold Well.” ~ Shawn Fairweather
Here’s a really smart guy who agrees with me.
“Ultimately, you have to decide which is more important —building your own brand, or building the brand of the website you’re contributing to? While these two concepts are not necessarily opposed, I strongly urge everyone reading this to err on the side of building YOUR OWN BRAND whenever possible. Websites tend to come and go; the only sensible long term strategy is to invest in something that’s guaranteed to be around for the rest of your life: YOU.” ~ Jeff Atwood
