Why I feel sorry for anyone starting Digital Marketing today..

The bootstrapped Challenge: An Entrepreneur’s Lament

If you are just getting into online marketing now I really feel sorry for you, it’s a bit like a poor old hermit who has just emerged out of a garage today after 30 years in ‘inventor’s isolation’ and has euphorically announced:

“I’ve invented something called a ‘personal computer!”           

You’re a bit late really, and my lament will be for the real ground level startups, the lady who has been complimented on her crocheting and has decided to give it a go as a business, the young teenager at home who has a great idea for T-shirts, and perhaps the granny who has a unique idea for legacy videos, if it was, say 15 years ago, and I was a UK Government recognized small business mentor as I am now. I would be so excited for them, but now I would really have to prepare them for the uphill battle they face.

You are going to have to embrace digital marketing as part of your overall business plan as it is now so universally recognized, like having a shop was 50 years ago, how can you have a business without an office or shopfront as it were? I am not saying it’s not possible to succeed without getting on Facebook and LinkedIn, but like a bicycle you can ride it without pedals, but with pedals makes a lot more sense.

My suspicions that business has taken over online marketing and shunned the real small people who it was originally meant for, was first realised when I had a short and unfulfilling foray into crowd funding websites maybe three years ago now. Sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo promised a route for startups with zero capital to find the funding they need and realise the dream.

Today when you look at some of the ‘inventions’ that you see on the popular crowd funding sites, you can’t help feel that they were made with expensive manufacturing, are quite far down the process with really well produced, engaging H.D. videos with hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube, and a well-designed brand any graphic designer would be proud of.

I can imagine the poor 'garage inventor' with his unique idea made out of an old vacuum cleaner parts and coat hangers stuck together with glue and duct tape in his shed at home, looking at some dynamic things that are promoted heavily on Kickstarter and giving up before he even starts.

Even if you had an’ instant cure for cancer,’ one pill that could save millions of lives and make you a saint, it would still take a good few months before anyone could notice your life saving pill by using social media for free!

It’s not about how good your product or service is anymore, it’s gone full circle to the big business purse strings, ‘who’ was slightly concerned about how social media gave a voice to the little minnows of the world a few years ago.

If you are a conspiracy theorist, and let’s face it, it’s a movement growing more and more believable each day, you would be forgiven to thinking that somewhere in a bank in Jerusalem:

 “Please don’t worry anymore Mr. R, This Social Media malarkey is firmly in the hands of the elite now and no one man band is going to rock the apple cart anymore.”

There is an adage out there that says; ‘It’s better to have a mediocre product and fantastic marketing than it is to have a fantastic invention with mediocre marketing.’ Marketers now rule the world.

I was approached a year or so back to get my crowd funding idea on to these sites with help from a ‘Crowdfunding consultant’ yes they do exist, they basically have taken over the platforms.

This company told me they would create a listing for me, create a video, a brand makeover, and PRE-FUND the money through a network of people who invest in whomever they are told to invest in, so the gullible ordinary people see there is already people investing and throw their money in and create the excitement that people need to see to be ‘part of the success.’

This manipulation overcomes the biggest challenge which is; nobody wants to be the first to invest in a crowdfunding campaign unless you are Mummy or family, and to give you a slick marketing edge to your project.

The crowdfunding consultant would do all this for a 2000 G.B.P. upfront free and 5 % of the end result. They have nothing to lose because if your crowdfunding exercise fails to meet the minimum needed, everyone gets their money back.

Only you would lose out with 2k Sterling if the project failed!

Then there is Facebook marketing and the ordinary person working at home who thinks that they can advertise free on Facebook for their business will be in for a shock. 5 Years ago posting something on the site would get to be in front of most of your friends and some of their friend’s friends, now however your free posts are lucky to be seen by 20% of your friends and no one outside your own network.

Oh sure, pay and you will be seen, and who can blame Facebook, you’d do the same, if you saw such a lucrative way to reach out to people who need to market heavily on Social Media, make them pay. But for the teenager who needs 20 bucks of Mum to get his T Shirts seen by his friends on Facebook and Mum is thinking better for her son to go down the local youth club or lay a table with his T Shirts outside the house in the good old fashioned Free American way!

I see so many people with 40k + likes on Twitter, and some have not even filled in their bio, so 40,000 people have decided to follow someone they know nothing about?? This really makes me wonder.

As a chap who has just got 3,000 Twitter followers over a few accounts. I feel immensely proud of my following considering, I have never paid for followers, I am not in any way famous, controversial, or notorious enough to be able to go out into the general public without being mobbed, so the people who follow me on Twitter are all real people who wanted to follow me to get info on sales skills, social media and Sales Leads, naturally.

My Twitter account is very dear to me because I share all new companies that add to our business directory network and we get a real good response each time, I sometimes wonder if I paid for another so many thousands to follow me, whether that would improve the response we get, I doubt it.

So with all this conflicted information we receive every day about growing your social media following on the big sites, but to make sure we have real people and a targeted following it is such an opus. It has taken me 7 plus years to get to a point of 500,000 people on social media accounts which is holding steady, meaning they are not culled every time the big sites have a purge on fake accounts.

Half a million followers we have that can mean perhaps; 0.01% clicking your posts and reading your blog your shared on social media, then 10% of them clicking your call to action, and half ; around 2 people, becoming a client. Consequently this ratio makes you wonder how, with your average 300 friends on Facebook, your 150 contacts on LinkedIn, and the Twitter account you have yet to start is going to help you at all!

So I do feel sorry for ambitious ‘young at heart entrepreneurs’ who have dreams that they will be able to market something they have to social media for free, or get funded on crowd funding sites very quickly indeed, I feel sorry for how getting crushed has to be an essential rung in the ladder to their success, and getting crushed so many times you will lose count, but the wrinkles or stomach ulcer may remind you from time to time.

I am here to be a bitter tasting pill and to tell you it is very possible, but it’s not that easy, it will takes years of skill and patience to build up a decent engaging following and to find investment on the internet.

To get my free e-book, just drop me an email and I’ll show you how marketing has taken over from sales, and how to understand the world of digital Marketing to find a regular supply of sales Leads for your business without having anything like a corporate sized budget.

See you on the other side of the Rat Race... Alan