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It’s something we don’t like to speak about: Fragile marketing systems. Much like we don’t like to talk about death and disease, yet most of us have life insurance and health insurance. Do you need to protect your marketing machine too?
Allow me to elaborate…
What makes your marketing machine fragile?
In short, the parts of it that you do not control, but rely on.
What are the risk factors?
1. A lack of diversity in traffic sources:
For many small business owners, being “everywhere” at once is simply not possible. They – or the person they delegate their social media marketing to – simply don’t have the time to work on it full time. As a result, they usually pick one platform, and make it work for them.
In terms of practicality, efficiency and results, it is all good and well. However, what happens when that platform decides to change its algorithm, and your traffic drops off a cliff all of a sudden?
You could lose half of your business’ income – or more – overnight. Literally. And you can continue losing income until such time as you can figure out how to get your exposure back up.
This is not just something that is limited to social media, though.
It is the same with search engines, and – to a lesser extent – even in paid advertising.
a. Search engines:
Google updates its algorithm all of the time. From time to time, however, we see some major updates – they even give them names: Panda, Penguin, and the latest “Helpful Content” update.
Every time one of these big updates rolled out, many, many websites lost half – or more than half – of their traffic. While the latest update was also aimed at some big websites with lower quality content pages, every update also saw smaller websites taking a hit.
b. Paid advertising:
In terms of advertising, both the search engines and social networks have their algorithms in place to determine where your ads will be displayed, and what the order of priority is (among advertisements). From time to time, the requirements change.
The first big change happened in 2008 with what was coined “the Google slap”. In essence, overnight, Google decided to penalize advertisers for sending people to poor quality landing pages, or landing pages not aligned with what the ad stated.
For those found to be in the wrong, the cost per click went through the roof, and their ads were displayed lower in the ad block (back then it was on the right hand side of the page, up to six ads at a time). Some advertisers complained about going from a few pennies per click to paying ten dollars and more per click, apparently without warning.
At the same time, the proverbial bar was raised very high for landing page quality. Back then, implementing it was not as easy as it is today.
At any given time, you can find the traffic from your paid ads decreasing, or the costs increasing, and depending on the reason, both could do so dramatically.
c. Social networks:
Social networks update their algorithms all the time. They observe user behaviour patterns, which keep shifting, and try to adapt to it as best as they can.
As those patterns change, and algorithms change, there have been many instances where platform users lost most of their traffic overnight.
The earliest example was Facebook pages. At the start, if you followed a Facebook page you would see its updates on your wall. Soon, however, Facebook realized that many people were following a lot of pages, and it was simply not possible to incorporate all of that content into users’ feeds without drowning out the voices of their friends.
The result? Today, when a page posts content, roughly 5% of its followers sees it.
The same goes for Youtube. Most people are following so many different channels that it is simply impossible to be seen by all of your followers.
On Youtube, however, many people search for specific things – so you have the opportunity to be shown to many people who do not follow you. On Facebook, not so much.
While it all makes sense, it also means that running a Facebook page is nowhere near as profitable as it used to be.
2. Not being in control of your own website:
AI- and software-driven platforms like HighLevel and WebFlow make it easy to create visually stunning websites. On HighLevel, AI can help you build it in a matter of minutes.
If that is the way you want to play it, it’s your call.
However, there is one thing to keep in mind:
In many cases, small business owners don’t even know what software was used to build their websites. They paid someone to build and host it. In many cases, they didn’t even pay to have it built – they just pay a rather substantial monthly fee.
The problem is this: What happens if your web designer goes out of business, or something happens to them? Let’s say it is a one person operation presenting themselves as a web design agency (very common).
If that person falls ill, or is injured in an accident, and the monthly fee for the platform is not paid on time…
ALL of the websites they built for their clients are lost. Gone. NO backups, with NO option of recovery.
This holds true regardless of the platform your website is built in – even if it was built using WordPress. If you do not control the hosting (or worse, the domain), you stand to lose your small business website if anything goes wrong on the supplier’s end.
Where does that leave YOU?
Even if you do control the domain, you still have to rebuild from scratch.
But it gets worse…
If you ever want to part ways with your designer, and the website is built on a platform like Wix, HigLevel or WebFlow…
On Wix, if your designer agrees, you can take control of the website. They will move it to your own Wix premium account.
On WebFlow, it seems there is no way to transfer an active site.
On HighLevel, it seems they do have the option to export it to another HighLevel account – but do you really want to pay $299 per month to host your website?
So, how do you minimize the risk to your marketing?
Any business is associated with some measure of risk. Your online marketing is no exception.
There are three basic ways in which you can mitigate the risk:
a. Diversify your traffic sources. The more different sources you have, the less the effect will be if one of them suddenly sends you less traffic.
b. Make sure that you control, or can get control, of your website and domain. We recommend using WordPress. Yes, it needs regular maintenance. But the hosting is cheap, and you can easily export your site to another location if need be.
c. Build a database of potential clients or customers – whether it is your personal rolodex, an email list, a WhatsApp group, or a push subscription list. Just place yourself in a position where you can have direct access to buyers if you suddenly have to lose most of your traffic.