COMMENTS
I found myself head shaking and sighing at a lot of this. It always frustrates me that there is this whole ecosystem where clueless online marketers, prey-on/work-with more clueless local businesses that don't know any better, and somehow these online marketers are called "experts".
There is a lot of garbage in that article, and even more behind it I'm sure.
One thing that is blatantly absent from the quotes and thoughts in the article, was what I consider to be the biggest hurdle in moving advertisers online. That is the necessary sea-change that has to take place in the thinking of the ad buyers. They need to move from a non-measurable medium, like a newspaper, where they are awed by the "reach" (which merely means their ad appears in x number of papers) numbers, to a measurable medium where they are able to see and measure the performance and response. The numbers sometimes look surprisingly low to the advertiser (20 clicks vs. 200,000 newspaper subscribers) in comparison, and helping them (the advertiser) to understand the differences in expectations is often the hardest part.
Well said, Andy.
However, I don't think it's hard for people to make the switch. These marketers just need to take an "Accounting for Marketing Folks 101 Course" that helps them calculate customer acquisition costs. Then, they just need to get a little better about asking "how much revenue and profit do you get from a new customer" type questions to figure out what online marketing activities are worth the expense of time and money.
It's rare that when I talk to a small business owner and find out that they generate say 30k revenue and 3k profit from a sale, that they don't see the reason for investing in measurable and predictable online marketing and online advertising activities, assuming the acquisition cost is below the $3k in profit. And usually, it's much lower, especially once they really start to master blogging, social media and SEO, as those things have continued returns long after the investment is made.