In the late 1990′s being online meant having a website. Then came the first waves of “e-commerce”: business-to-consumer, business-to-business, supply chain, online shopping, etc. These early efforts were usually costly and cumbersome custom designed solutions. Then, in the early 2000s, as more and more businesses went online and the cost of ecommerce came down, being found in the clutter of sites online (search engine optimization) grew in importance. Having a blog became an integral part of a successful search engine optimization program. As you can see, what it meant to have a website simultaneously came down in cost and grew in complexity, but being online still revolved totally around your website.
Then came social media. Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, all added to the complexity of what it meant to be online. The power and influence of the “social media” engines has grown exponentially over the last couple of years. So at the end of the first decade of the 21st century a successful online presence will include a solution customized and tailored to your business including some or all of: a website, a blog, a newsletter, interactive media, integrated calendaring, scheduling, and ordering systems, a retail and/or wholesale store, membership only services, a business version of your website and marketing message on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin, all of which needs to include a carefully coordinated search engine optimization program. Oh, and in all of this don’t forget that you will need to continuously update and grow your online presence or it will begin to grow stale and falter.
Think of it this way, imagine you have a brick and mortar wholesale business headquartered in a warehouse in an industrial park and you want to open a retail division. You will need to: secure a store front in a good retail location, get the electric and heat and phones and Internet access turned on, purchase the equipment and materials needed to display your wares for sale, clean, paint, and prepare your store for public access, and staff the store with support and management employees. This is the equivalent of setting up a modern website. At this point would you expect to open the doors and be swamped with customers? No. You would need to develop and deploy a comprehensive marketing and advertizing plan to “get the word out” and get the customers in the store. This is akin to a careful social media marketing and search engine optimization plan.
Total Business Group can provide all of these services for you to bring you from concept, to deployment and ongoing maintenance, to growth and success with a full suite of flat-rate solutions at a fraction of the cost of hiring full-time employees or contracting with multiple different companies.
