Even Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook (and everyone else) are powerless to stop you getting their business – but you need to get on the online marketing train before it’s too late

Crunching the numbers, ever increasing people are going online to Google and social media for everything

There has been a 23% increase in number of searches online per month since 2007

Assuming similar growth in the subjects these people are searching for it is extremely likely that more than 90% of people now use the internet to find local businesses and around 90% of people research a product or service online before eventually purchasing offline from a local business.

Google know these statistics and they understand what they mean. The user experience is as dependent on the search terms as it is on the user’s location for the majority of commercially intended searches.

More and more businesses are providing industry information so as to compete with their online savvy peers; Google will of course strive to provide the best information that is most relevant to the user and is taking location more and more into account.

No matter what your business is, if it has had any success at all, people are looking for your services RIGHT NOW

It is critical that they can find you in the sea of competition and, when they do find you, that they are communicated with effectively enough to enquire for your services.

Many clients I have worked with (and many people I have met that should have become my clients) have been stuck in the past somewhat. The old school advertising giants of the past are now on equal footing with online savvy smaller businesses.

The majority of customers whether business to consumer or business to business have put up barriers to avoid traditional marketing techniques

We take the bills out of the mail pile on the floor each day and throw the junk away. We listen to music or talk to friends whilst walking around so we ignore billboards and can avoid canvassers in the street. We opt in for the telemarketing prevention programs in our area, we ignore unknown callers on our mobiles. We are answering our emails on public transport rather than looking at adverts onboard.  We set up junk email filters for anything that we feel we didn’t ask for. We make our own online radio stations so we choose our own music, we have video on demand, we filter all of our product searches by what we are actually looking for.

If we don’t ask for it, we don’t want it. We know everything we want to know in the world is at our fingertips by searching online. We do not want interruption.

But we do expect to find exactly what we need or want at the top of the search engines once we have decided what it is that we need or want!

Even the gimmicks of yesteryear – a charity bathtub race, a sponsored tour bus are pointless unless backed up by the right online techniques to get viral marketing exposure.

It really has become a brave new marketing world

Yes, word of mouth still has its place. But more and more frequently we will look online for that word of mouth. The information age is rapidly becoming the consumer opinion age. Everyone can have a voice in the online world in whatever capacity they choose.

It is only a matter of time before we will all just search for a product and expect to find reviews, social media, tweets, videos, Facebook popularity, pages of related content of consumer experiences on our social media sites and recommendations from our friends, family and trusty reviewers the world over. If it does not have that level of exposure, it is not worthy of our attention.

This is increasingly becoming the vastly predominant basis of whether or not to do business with a given company.

Find a competent online marketing company for your going concern or do it yourself if you are a startup or small business. Get with it now and enjoy being ahead of your local competition and start catching up with your national and international competition.