YOU PROBABLY DON’T RECOGNIZE Elias St. Elmo Lewis by his name, but his work can mean pure marketing fire to your security industry business.

Alex Chavez and David Morgan of Security Dealer Marketing, a full-service marketing agency for the security industry, share tips and tricks to help dealers and integrators reach a larger audience.

Many of the modes used in the security industry to connect and support business growth, such as tradeshows and exhibitions, have been closed to enforce social distancing.

Marketing in the security industry is hard. The buyer's journey is beset by a range of shiny objects, competing offers, fear, uncertainty, doubt, budget shifts and cuts, priority shifts, urgent and important fires to extinguish, as well as various other threats to goals and timelines that disrupt the process.

It is not unusual for marketing to see shifts in strategies and their effectiveness according to consumer behaviors. Sometimes those changes are swift and can permanently alter many industries nationally, or even globally. This is one of those times.

As you look toward 2021 and the development of your next marketing strategy, you may want to consider vertical marketing. In its simplest form, vertical marketing is dedicating and tailoring your marketing efforts to a particular vertical industry, such as education, construction or government, to strategically appeal to that industry, rather than marketing to a wider, horizontal audience with a less specific appeal.

“What’s the deal with …” is so synonymous with the 90’s observational comedy Seinfeld that you can probably hear Jerry Seinfeld’s voice just reading it. The show often posed the question in relation to things in everyday life that, in some ways, don’t make sense.

There’s hardly a person in the electronic security industry that does not realize the value of networking, but mention the value of actively networking with fellow industry professionals, and you get a mixed reaction.

If we mentioned SEO, your first thought is probably Google. But it isn’t the only site you should consider when you want to optimize your local SEO. The other big player is YouTube, which is its own search engine. If you’ve been putting off investing in video marketing, now is the time to get serious about it.

On any normal day, connecting with your audience on social media requires forethought, care and tact. At the epicenter of a worldwide crisis, it requires all that and more.