Internet Marketing in San Antonio

If you search for Internet marketing on google you will find everything from get rich quick schemes to established marketing agencies. But if you are a small to medium size business in San Antonio, TX with a brick and mortar location, what should Internet marketing mean to your business?

According to wikipedia, Internet Marketing is “the promotion of products or services over the Internet.” For businesses in San Antonio this simply means using the Internet to increase your sales. Even if you don’t have a product that can be easily sold on a website you can still use the Internet to drive leads and help close business deals.

San Antonio’s economy has been affected by the global economy, but not to the degree that many other parts of the country have been affected. That means that local businesses have a unique opportunity to push ahead and grow during rough economy times. Over the next few years those who don’t effectively move their marketing budget to the Internet will have a harder time competing. San Antonio business owners and marketing directors need a sustainable plan for growth and should look at Internet marketing as both a solution and a process.

Internet Marketing Solution (Don’t Skip This Part)

All businesses have problems. Even the best businesses in the world have those painful areas that they don’t like to talk about. While effective Internet marketing can’t solve every business problem, there are many that it can solve. Before you begin building a process for online marketing you need to take an honest look at your business and find those sensitive areas and dig deep into what is wrong. Define them in the most thorough and descriptive way you can. Keep those critical problems on the top of your mind as you build out the process so that everything you decided to pursue with your Internet marketing plan is focused directly on solving those issues. If you skip this part you are gambling away your online marketing dollars.

Internet Marketing Process

After isolating your critical issues, begin formulating your Internet marketing plan. It’s important to realize is that it is an ongoing process. Be sure your plan is both immediately impactful and sustainable. This means that you can’t just attack one area of online marketing.

A few years ago “SEO (search engine optimization)” was the buzz word in marketing; now it’s “social media”; in the future it will move to something else. Don’t get caught up in the buzz words. Are those things important? Yes, but only as part of a comprehensive plan.

Design a process for marketing online that builds each week on what you’ve done in the weeks before. You should plan on taking the first 12 months to build up your content and fine tune the process so that it is sustainable well into the future. But that doesn’t mean that the hard work stops at 12 months. Humanity has never seen a technology that changes as dramatically and as quickly as the Internet; you need to have analysis tools in place and develop the expertise to evaluate the data effectively. This feedback loop is critically important moving forward.

I can tell you online marketing is not easy. You must be willing to constantly change and adapt to the new ways things are done online each and every year, but the rewards to your business are huge. I think San Antonio is on the precipice when it comes to the marketing shift that much of the rest of the country is currently experiencing. Any company in San Antonio without a comprehensive plan for Internet marketing is already at a serious disadvantage, but that disadvantage is only going to increase in the coming years. The time is now. Get started right away.