How many of us take (or have) the time to sit down and have an objective look at our Marketing strategies and spend? Often we work such long hours, get caught up in the crisis of the moment, have to juggle the work/home life balance among other things just to try and keep our heads above water - particularly in these tough times.

Often with small to medium businesses the basics get covered like a White Pages listing, Yellow Pages listing (maybe even an advert), signage, website, co-ordinated stationery, maybe staff uniforms, and branding on company vehicles.

Do we truly know what effect each of these has to gain or retain customers, to introduce or raise the profile and brand awareness of products and services? Can a dollar figure be put to this? When did anyone last look to see if the business is getting what they pay for?

Recently Mindiam completed an exercise looking at a wide range of businesses in one region based on how they advertise in the Yellow Pages and how that relates to other marketing. For example, with one industry group there were nearly 550 entries online - yet by the time multiple entries were removed this dropped to around 380 entries.

Occasionally there is a legitimate reason - like different business entities belonging to the one business - so we accounted for this. The 170 multiples we removed were for minor variations on name (including spelling errors), or on address (like including a Suite Number in one entry, or where a comma was placed).

Of these 380 entries only 7 showed that those businesses had a direct link to their website. Our own subsequent research showed around 150 had websites. One of those seven links was for a medical industry related business yet the Yellow Pages link took clients to a Blinds and Curtains business in a totally different state around 1,500km away.

This was just the tip of the iceberg - there were similar ommissions with FAX numbers and other contact information including address.

The point of this example is to show how 'store blindness' can creep into various areas.
A fresh pair of eyes can see things in a different way to those that have been there for years. It also shows the scale of how many businesses can be overspending significant dollars for things such as multiple entries in Yellow Pages that could be spent on other areas like designing or developing a website.

In the case of our exercise around fifty percent of the 380 businesses had no website that we could find. Of the other fifty percent a large number had used an 'industry specialist' Web Design company - resulting in a lot of similarity in design between competitor businesses. Some competing businesses even used the same generic stock artwork - hardly clever.

By the time we looked closely at all the websites we were astounded at just how basic and unprofessional and visually unappealing many are. In addition only 15 had links to Facebook and only 4 to Twitter. None had any form of e-Commerce. Many had news sections to their sites - yet the newest entry was 12-18 months old. That's hardly news. In terms of SEO, even when searching for one business by name, their actual entry didn't appear until number 15, midway on Page 2 of the Google search.

So not only were many wasting dollars on one area of their marketing spend but not utilizing all the electronic marketing methods that could grown their business, keep them in touch with existing clients and generate a new group of clients - for minimal cost.

If we look at retail businesses they are constantly changing their window display - yet that expect their website to have the same look often for years, with minimal or zero changes. The website is a vital marketing tool - it needs to reflect seasonal changes, new products or service, specials, have newsletters, have an e-Commerce function, and be fresh looking and user friendly.

We have seen businesses spend countless wasted dollars on multiple phone listings yet nothing on SEO so that their listings don't maximize their potential to reach a greater target audience.

Times are tough and it's time that businesses took a look at their marketing spend and realised that if they reduced some spending waste and invested in their website and e-Commerce, utilized tools such as Analytics to see how their sites perform against competitors, as well as used SEO wisely then they could make a real difference to how customers and potential customers view and interact with them.