It’s really no contest for your Online Marketing Focus
Here are the stats:
The Online group buying phenomenon is now 2 years old and growing at around 18% per month.
Over 1 million discount transactions per month are being made through Groupon,Living Social and their peers as many sme’s consider engaging Groupon as a sound Online marketing strategy.
Social media has been the main engine for growth of this phenomenon.
HOWEVER
Small businesses have been unprepared for the voucher redemption and Customer complaints via Fair Trading have been growing dramatically mainly due to people not being able to book with their voucher or even get through to the supplier on the phone.
Many small businesses have underestimated what is required to manage a deluge of massively discounted business(virtually all of it is at a substantial loss) and they will be even more distressed when they see the impact on their bottom line.
It is the classic commercial mistake thinking that as Groupon and their friends don’t charge(they actuall do though) then lots of new customers without further costs is a great idea.
The Problem being that add Groupon’s fee to the discount applied to your retail price and say goodbye to profits, contribution to fixed and variable costs and hello to work hard to make a loss!
Search Engine Optimisation has exactly the opposite impact on your business, producing qualified customers prepared to pay market price for your product or service, not just next month but the month after….the year after……and just maybe the decade later. So what are you waiting for? SEO is the biggest no brainer in the history of doing Business and to ignore it or pay lipservice to it is extremely short sighted. So if you think Groupon is going to solve your marketing challenges,then rethink because once you have committed to a proper online strategy though SEO, your business will never look back.
