Multimedia Marketing and Business

I love to talk about marketing. It is just so much common sense stuffed into so many opportunities to me, but doing it correctly seems to be a mystery to most. I've never really had a problem coming up with marketing ideas, or how to make them work effectively. My problem has always been what to do with the traffic, or how to close the sale. A pretty common problem, but why a lot of times these are all split into different sectors of a business.

I don't know how many salesmen I have worked with over the years that were jsut terrible marketers. They were great in those one on one meeting where they could sell their asses off to a couple, or a business owner, but getting that foot in the door seemed to be the big problem. They just couldn't get enough faces in front of them to use their personal charms and make sales.

With the technology age giving every person with any extra cash in their pockets, there are electronics everywhere you go. People are so connected online that the various social networking sites, and media sites available make it so you can reach millions of people with very little cost. Sometimes very little effort as well. That doesn't mean it is completely easy to do.

Take for example this article about Using Multimedia for Business. This is a GREAT article to give you ideas about what multimedia and social avenues to market, but there is one sentence in this that I take exception to:

"However, your company's chances of going viral are left more to fate than skill, but that's no reason to discount the importance of multimedia for your business."

While this may be true for those that are just taking shots in the dark, it isn't true for the most part. It is a cop out. There are methods to this madness of marketing. Every single place to market has different rules. You can't brush a broad stroke over marketing and expect it to work 100% of the time for every medium. The author of that article doesn't actually do this either, which is why I felt the comment was off base, and shouldn't have been used.

If you want to market on Twitter you need to study how to market on Twitter, NOT just marketing. People have already tested it, and found what works. Don't try and re-invent the wheel(This is one of the truest expressions in business you will ever hear.). Don't try to act like you know it all either. It isn't the same as marketing offline, and it certainly isn't the same is it would be to market on television, or other media.

The best advice anyone can give when looking at places to market is to study the actual market and the people in it. Read what other people have written about marketing in THAT MEDIA. "Marketing on Twitter" isn't the same as "Marketing Online". You can't study a broad spectrum of online marketing and try to fit Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Digg.com, search engines like Google, etc. into the same bowl. They ARE NOT THE SAME. Study them individually. Getting ideas about WHERE to market isn't a bad idea, but using that medium correctly needs to be taken on a case by case basis.

One other thing. You aren't going to do it right the first time in most cases. This is why you need to study the medium. You really don't want yourself out there with tons of failed marketing experiments do you? Using sites like Twitter, Digg, etc. get your name out there even if they don't draw a lot of immediate reaction. How? These sites are VERY strong in Google search listings. If your company is on these sites looking stupid, odds are that your company will show up pretty high in a Google search for your company. Probably above your good results since they are older. So...just keep that in mind as well before you just start throwing crap against the wall.