3 reasons to diversify your online marketing

Too many small businesses are one algorithm tweak or shift in the social media popularity winds away from a wiped out digital marketing program.

These businesses essentially put all of their digital marketing effort into one strategy or social media platform. The online marketing world is littered with their corpses:

  • The businesses that depended on organic SEO based on backlinks from low value sites. (Their Google rankings disappeared when the search engine giant started penalizing sites with those bogus links.)
  • Companies that relied on their posts appearing in the Facebook newsfeeds of their fans and followers. (Facebook is constantly erecting new roadblocks between your posts and news feeds.)
  • Influencers who launched careers using Snapchat stories. (Many lost their audiences when Instagram got into the “story” business and caused an exodus of users away from Snapchat over to Instagram.)
  • 200 million Vine users were lopped off when Twitter decided to shut down the mini-video platform.

These examples capsulize the first reason you need to work hard to diversify your online marketing:

1. When you depend on one platform or strategy, it’s not a question of “if” conditions will change, but “when” they will change.

We’ve encouraged you to be exploring multiple social media platforms to find where your top prospects hang out. That is always a sound strategy, and it should be an ongoing one.

Not only do the demographics of your core customers evolve (they tend to get older!), but the next generation of your top prospects is out there…somewhere. Your job is to find out where they are and start laying the groundwork for bringing them into the fold.

For these reasons:

2. You should develop multiple marketing channels to convert current prospects and nurture your next generation of customers.

The third reason is as much about you as it is about your prospects or customers:

3. Exploiting multiple marketing channels develops and improves your creativity and broadens its appeal.

Maybe you are an incredible article writer or have one on your team. But how good are you with images or videos?

Teachers are well aware of the fact that people learn best with differing modes of delivering educational content. Some are visual learners, other are auditory, others need a tactile experience. I think that for most businesses a parallel situation exists with prospects. Don’t think that your 2,000-word blogs will press everyone’s button, in fact they might turn off some prospect. Some may need to see that information in an infographic or video to become truly engaged.

Make your marketing multi-dimensional. Don’t sing a one-note song, your audience will soon become bored.