And in that time we have published over 5,700 articles, built a Facebook page with over 6,300 likes and have consistently gone over 40,000 unique visits every month to our news site.
The mission of The Apopka Voice is to tell the story of this community and to inform, engage and inspire. But are we telling the story of your business? Are we informing, engaging and inspiring Apopka about you?
We may not be 100 years old, but we are the most read source of online news in Apopka, and there is no better place to tell the story of your business than The Apopka Voice.
Marketing used to be easy. Take out an ad in the local newspaper, the phone book, maybe a local magazine, a billboard and if you had the money a television commercial. And if your sales went up, you knew it was working.
But did you ever really know?
The best you could do to truly know if your advertising campaign was working was to add a coupon, maybe a URL code, or ask how they heard about your business on the phone.
But today, the buying process is far more sophisticated than that.
The modern age of the internet has drastically changed the way buyers (both business-to-business and business-to-consumer) interact with businesses while moving through their journey of making a purchase. The internet has not only allowed buyers to access an unlimited number of resources to utilize in their research, but it has completely flipped the traditional method of selling upside down because consumers are much more educated at the time they are ready to make a decision.
Most traditional marketing (TV, Radio, Print) works like this:
Company A places an ad with the intention of completely interrupting what the potential customer is doing. The hope is to get the customer to stop in their tracks, pay attention to what has interrupted them, and make a conscious decision to interact with Company A on another platform (phone, internet, social media).
Here’s the problem - people hate being interrupted.
Even during the Super Bowl, when consumers tend to enjoy the commercials, a study by Communicus showed that 60% of all ads ran during the event don’t lead to an increase in the purchase or buying intent. Even online, where engagement is supposed to be higher, a recent Google study showed that 69% of web users bounced from a site when presented with an interruptive display ad.
So what does this mean? Well to put it plainly, people get annoyed with interruptive ads, and it sometimes turns them off to brands. People want to consume media in a way that is comfortable and non-intrusive, which is why an inbound strategy is much better suited to drive new business in today’s world.
The other issue with outdated advertising is a lack of trackability.
For many small to medium-sized businesses, this is a huge sticking point. They simply don't have the resources to be able to implement the types of tracking mechanisms that a Fortune 500 brand might with traditional media to measure engagement and return. They want every dollar tracked and want a clear understanding of what their marketing dollars are bringing back into their business. Traditional media doesn’t easily allow for this kind of tracking, while digital online advertising does a far better job at accurately tracking who is seeing your ads and reading your releases.
Most everyone’s behavior is being tracked online, and the power of that big data can be used to help better reach your customer base. There’s even an app that allows you to get alerts when your emails have been opened.
Pretty powerful right? A solid digital marketing strategy with tracking mechanisms such as this will allow your organization to better reach your audience and refine your sales process with pinpoint precision.
Let me show you how to do this for your business with a modernized, interactive, and inexpensive marketing campaign from The Apopka Voice. Call me at 407/437-5654 or email me at reggieconnell@theapopkavoice.com and let me tell the story of your business 365 days a year.
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