How much time do you spend online?

If you’re like the rest of us, you spend most of your day surfing the web for content relevant to your personal life and your professional life. The typical person in the U.S. spends over seven hours online every day surfing content, watching videos, checking social media and doing email.  About 1 percent of the time we spend searching, a fraction of the time that we spend surfing, but it’s an extremely important 1 percent since it drives us to the sites that provide what we are looking for.

The takeaway for marketers is that you “must be present to win.”  Your prospects are doing a ton of research online when deciding what to buy and who to buy it from. So if you’re not there you can’t make it into their consideration set and therefore you might as well not exist.

I’m a huge fan of content marketing [as you can see on this site] but I also know that advertising is the best [fastest, most cost-effective] way to be absolutely sure that you are present to win — building awareness with prospects and influencing their purchasing decision.  My team uses what we call the “power combo,” a mix of display advertising and search engine advertising tailored for each stage of our customer buying journey.  That approach has produced excellent results for us which I’ll dig into more in a subsequent post.