I received a text message earlier today from someone who is thinking about going solo and starting up a business. The most interesting thing for me, as a professional online marketer, is that the industry he works in, is one which is well known in the offline work, but when it comes to the online world, there’s very little about it. Why? Quite simply, it’s not the sort of business that would think about an online presence, purely because of ignorance really.
So what does this mean and why does it excite me?
Well, think about it – these days when it comes to online marketing, search engine optimisation, banner advertising, PPC marketing and so forth, it’s normally companies which are more up to speed with new media trends. Think about the industries that spend a huge amount of money on online marketing – accommodation, mobile, anything web, dating, vehicle sales, insurance and so forth. These are just a few industries of millions, of which thousands will not be aware of the potential that online marketing offers.
Think about things like doctors – Let’s look at an example: a doctor who runs a private practice in Cape Town .. do a google search quickly, what do you notice? Not a single website on the first page of results has any SEO done on it. This shows that when it comes to doctors in Cape Town, the Google search results are widely open for someone who wants to capitalise. I can confidently say that I could rank a Cape Town doctor’s website in the first 3 results in one or two months flat. For those who don’t understand all of this, what I’m saying is that if a doctor in Cape Town came to me and needed more business, I could make his website appear in the first few results when someone searches for “cape town doctor” on Google.
There are thousands of industries which have not tapped into this form of marketing and what I find really interesting is that most of these industries are older industries, by that I mean that they’ve been operating for decades and are established in an offline world; the skill sets are there and the requirement by the public for these industries services/products will not stop. So, add a digital arm and sales would be increased hugely.
Back to the text message – the industry that the person is interested in starting a business is an old industry. Starting up a company would not require a hugely expensive traditional marketing strategy, a carefully thought about digital marketing plan would result in a huge amount of business in a very short period of time, purely because it’s like competiting with no competitors and we all know how great a monopoly is. It’s an interesting though.. offline and online can be completely separate, a hugely competitive offline industry might not stop a small time business venture from gaining a monopoly online!
I’ve spoken a great deal about SEO, but think about PPC – Pay Per Click advertising in most cases determines the cost per click based on the competitiveness of the words being targeted, again, an untapped niche would have little or no competition, you could be paying cents per click for targeted traffic aposed to a few rand per click in a more competitive industry.
This is the sort of topic I could write about for hours on end, but my point has been made – If you want to start a business which deals with an old profession or one which doesn’t have a huge online presence, you could find yourself at the end of the rainbow if you can find someone who knows how to create a decent digital marketing strategy.
For many of us, at one point or another in our lives, we’ve toyed with the idea of running our own business. Whether it’s a millionaire business owner that’s inspired you, wanting to follow a suppressed passion and try something different, or just the desire to get out of the hum-drum, day-to-day rat-race, running your own business is what you want to do. But where do you start? The answer is: right here… Register for the UCT Start and Manage a Small Business course, take the first step towards achieving your dream!
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