The Future of Business Growth on the Web
Are you old enough to remember when you "let your fingers do the walking" in the Yellow Book? Along with the slide rule and the buggy whip, the Yellow Book was once an essential part of life that has now been relegated to the status of antique.
For the younger reader, let me explain. The Yellow Book was a big, fat, yellow book, filled with tissue-weight pages that contained the names, addresses, and phone numbers of businesses. As an example, if a person wanted to order mothers day flowers for Mother’s Day, they would go to Yellow Book to find a florist. Each business was invited to take out an ad to highlight their listing. The books were delivered to your front door a few times a year. Old ones were deemed excellent for elevating young children sitting at the dinner table.
Yes, it seems barbaric by today's standards. The whole world changed with the Internet, and business marketing strategies were affected just like everything else. Whereas before a company could count on business from their Yellow Book ad, today businesses are focusing more on their websites, social media outlets, and email campaigns to generate sales leads.
It's almost impossible to imagine a company of any size today without a website. While many are just glorified advertisements, just as many pack in useful information that turns a website into a resource. Businesses know that if they can allure visitors, they are more likely to generate sales leads via calls to action on their web pages. A call to action is a contact form, free offer, free subscription, or some other inducement for visitors to identify themselves to the website owner. A lot of effort is spent converting these sales leads into sales.
One method is to use email campaigns targeted at sales leads. Email is another phenomenon taken for granted today that didn't exist two generations ago. For many people, email (and its close cousin, texting) has replaced the telephone as the preferred means of communication. Savvy businesses send out steady streams of emails containing useful content to potential buyers. Simple email containing just ads is called spam, and is usually actively avoided by consumers. Instead, the public looks for a reason to open and read email beyond just raw ads. This is one of the challenges facing businessmen today, and the future will see only increased pressure on businesses to add substantial content to their mailings.
Similarly, companies will increasingly rely on social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, to get their messages out. Corporate Facebook pages will proliferate over time, and business-oriented social sites, like LinkedIn, will continue to experience growth in the future.
