People Are Looking
Did you know that according to the Kelsey Group 97% of Consumers Use Online Media to Shop Locally? As you can tell from the video to your right, social media is not a fad, it’s here to stay. People are looking for your products and services in much more convenient ways including mobile search and specialty sites that rate and review. With almost 3 Billion local searches monthly, people are telling businesses what they want. Are you listening? If you are, you stand to profit and grow you business by giving consumers what they want.

Competition
It is important that you get into the game quickly. By being in front of market trends, you position yourself to be on the cutting edge of consumer trends. Think about how quickly Facebook has grown and how millions of companies are making money from this emerging marketing technology. As the mass catches up, you will have already been there and understand how to capitalize on these new marketing trends when they are playing “catch-up”.

History
History also plays an important role with positioning. When you begin your marketing is critical. Google looks at history heavily and weighs inbound links as well as blogs and articles based on when they were published. If you are entrenched with rich media such as video, pictures, articles, bloggs, tweets, etc.. your competition has a very difficult time overtaking your top position. It is estimated that companies who get into marketing and try to achieve top positions for their keywords spend between 7 and 10 times as much as their competition to overtake top positions for their keywords and key phrases. This is a double negative, because as you are spending 10 times what they did to get top positioning, they are gaining market share in both the number of customers as well as profits by being at the top. You need to get into the game now!

Cost
There is no doubt that an investment is required for social marketing. Both time and money are at stake, however the payoff can be huge if done properly. No one argues that there is legitimate returns from social media marketing. The advantage now is that you have the ability to go where your potential clients are and are able to interact with them in ways never possible before. This is the emerging Web 2.0 that you hear so much about. Being small does not matter anymore. Especially in this economy, everyone is looking for a great product or service at a reasonable price.

One of the biggest problems is that it is very complicated to know where to spend your time. Now you have to deal with Facebook, Twitter, Citysearch, Yelp, and a plethora of other crazy names out there, each with it’s own focus and client base. In addition to this, you now need to focus on local marketing using technologies such as “geotagging”. To put it simply, marketing is more demanding than it used to be.

Gone are the yesteryears of simply placing an ad in the newspaper and getting customers to show up…

or is it?