A balance in external marketing, internal marketing & SEO

Within any company, there is a struggle to either gain or retain customers (Yes, if you’re stomach is tightening at the thought of that, you should be scared). Which is often overshadowed by the less important, but still somewhat important objective of maximising profits.

It is that kind of struggle to balance your customer retention (internal marketing) and new sales (external marketing) efforts that is going to kick your businesses ass when it comes to your bottom line and customer reviews.

This is a scene I have seen far too often. Hell, I’m sure you know the type, even if you own your own business or work as a sole operator. We’ve all dealt with them before – the slick haired, coffee sipping, power tie wearing business development manager  Lumbergh. The type of person who will pull a valuable service member away from their responsibilities to work on a proposal for their hot new client at the detriment of the myriad of unhappy clients that are out there in the background.

It’s a great business strategy. No, really. It is… if you own shares in a competing company.

Who HASN’T worked with a Lumbergh before?

Sure thing smart ass. What do you suggest a BDM does instead?

It came to me in a dream… or a Dilbert strip. I can’t remember. All I know is the answer was right in front of my eyes and it didn’t take a dollar $ign cha$ing  $ale$ manager to point this out.

The one place few businesses fail to look at when they want to increase sales & revenue – is their very own offices! This is where internal marketing comes into play.

What is internal marketing?

Internal Marketing is a concept that was developed by Leonard L Berry, who developed concepts in business theory that dealt with retaining customers and making sure that it worked in harmony with external marketing

An example of how internal marketing works to influence external marketing – Get your account managers to go out and ask 5 of your clients what problems SEO has fixed for them. Then have them report to you what the results are.

Based on those results, work them into your services offerings & proposals which will push positives in the minds of new customers rather than triggering questions from them which can become embarrassing when you don’t know the answer. It’s shit like that which won’t win you clients.

A quote that springs to mind with the above is from John F Kennedy who said this on the 14th of September, 1960 at the Democratic Women’s Luncheon in New York

“A Democratic administration can never and will never negotiate with the Russians in a position of weakness.”

Of course there aren’t any Russians to worry about in your business (unless you’re competing with Kogan) so just take it to heart that when you reply back to a potential customer with a proposal or conversion that doesn’t cover any of their needs or addresses, you risk losing out on revenue due to a lack of faith in your authority.

This also works with your website as well as mentioned many times by Matt Cutts here, here and here. (Here also)

So what is external marketing?

I’m glad you asked! Or rather projected it through the thousands of conversions and content that have ever existed in the history of the internet.

External Marketing focuses on methods and strategies to gain the attention and convert anything that exists outside of your business, or in other words – selling.

In terms of SEO, this equals to the following.

• Drafting an page which discounts your product for a limited time
• Targeting “keyword +offer +discount +voucher +coupon” to cash in on people’s appeal to hip pocket factor
• Retargeting your home page to change your call to actions based on landing keyword

All in all, external marketing isn’t anything you don’t know already. It just has a fancier name to allow the “internal” differentiator to exist within the phrase “internal marketing”

Striking a balance

Whilst I hate to do this, stay tuned till tomorrow when I come back and cover the rest of this article!