In the Information Age (some call it the 4th industrial revolution) with all its ‘Artificial Intelligence’, we are actually coming back to authentic ‘craftsmanship’.  For example, your organic gluten-free snacks business may thrive on the social media platforms but the actual product that you present must still be an authentic product.  So yes, its easy to post photos but the photos must showcase your authentic product, the stock photo will not really do.   Furthermore, we are dealing more with ‘serious viewers’ and less with ‘serious readers’.   These two aspects alone transformed small business marketing from the simple weekly newspaper advertisement to multi-platform marketing, which is impossible without multimedia.  The everyday businessman is more pressured today than ever before to communicate his or her ‘craft’ in order to convert clients and the way we communicate is more ‘visual’! 

This brings us to the point:  most serious medium-sized businesses can most of the time not afford to ignore multimedia in their marketing efforts.  It is an unavoidable BRAND BUILDING STRATEGY and in broad terms, one of the modern-day methods to convert clients.  I’m not talking of the fish & chips cafe at the corner of main and church street or the dry cleaners near the taxi rank…  I’m talking of the non-franchise seafood restaurant, the serious construction company, the organic cheese manufacturer, the exclusive sofa manufacturer or real wood furniture maker and maybe the mohair clothing manufacturer.  

SWORD deals with business owners’ headaches over marketing and over the years we have come to identify quite a few serious gaps in business people’s comprehension of how to utilize all the free multi-platform internet possibilities out there.  This sobering ‘social network illiteracy’ of the masses has become the driving force behind most opportunistic and appealing ‘instant solutions’ on the internet market. From ‘build a website in 5-minutes’ to make your own professional TV-commercial.  ‘Instant solutions’ have a definite limit on how far you really can go and how effective it is. ‘Instant Internet Solutions’ usually turns out to leave its ‘most eager’ customers empty-handed and deceived at the end.