Online marketing can be hard, largely due to the vast amount of information and resources available. When you are managing your brand online, it is impossible to cover every single possible website that might list your company’s information, try as you might.

I previously worked with a financial advisory firm who had clients calling saying that their business phone number was not working. Not an ideal situation. I worked with them to check all of the major venues that I could think of to verify that their phone number was, in fact, listed correctly. We quickly exhausted all of the major options such as Google, Bing, Yelp, and Yahoo.

At this point, I was stumped for how to help fix this problem. Clients couldn’t reach the business, and this needed to be fixed. To figure out the problem I started learning more about the client base. They were in their 70s-80s on average, so I started to try to put myself in their shoes, which is when it hit me. Before Google, people used the yellow pages to look up phone numbers. Sure enough, the incorrect phone number was on yellowpages.com and we were able to fix the problem.

As a marketer it is easy to think from only one point of view, yours. This is what we tend to do naturally and it can be difficult to exit that mind set. When you are setting up a marketing plan for a brand, be sure to take your own shoes off and look at it from your target client’s perspective. If you do this, I think you might often find very different results.

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