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06 November 2010

Considering the Internet as a Valid Way of Marketing

By: Category: Local Business Marketing Comments: 0

It is very common for business owners to dismiss the internet. Many people still hold to the old beliefs in marketing, and are convinced that only ads on TV, the Yellow Pages, radio, or print media are valid ways of promoting their business. This couldn’t be further from the truth. What has really happened in the world of marketing is that online small business marketing has actually become the best return on investment option available to a business looking to promote their services. What remains is for more business to realize the opportunities which will become available to them as soon as they consider the internet a valid way to market their services.

There are several ways to convince business owners that the internet is the most advantageous media for them to pursue in terms of their marketing. The first way to do this is by example. It is always important to have access to success stories. When you can point to businesses that have expanded their operations or become more profitable since they started marketing online, it goes a long way to helping convince business owners that they can also profit from online marketing. A business owner should also take the time to talk to peers or colleagues to find out what benefits they have had when they started marketing online. The results will be almost universally the same. Almost every business notices their business pick up once they commit to a proper online marketing effort.

The next way to show a business owner how the internet can work for them is to talk about the ROI which is involved with internet marketing. The cost of marketing and advertising through traditional media is incredibly expensive. Often, the return seen through this type of advertising, especially if a campaign is not maintained long enough, is very low. However, the ROI on internet marketing can be extremely profitable. There have even been studies done which have shown that email marketing is one of the best ROI investments that any company can make in their marketing funnel. When small business owners come to understand this, they start to see why marketing on the internet is something that they need to be strongly considering.

The next step in showing business owners why the internet is a valid means of marketing is actually being able to explain to them what kinds of services they should be paying for or receiving. The reason that many people fear advertising on the internet is because they don’t know exactly what types of services they should be pursuing, and what types of benefits they can expect to see from them. When a business owner starts to understand the value of social networking, social media, local business marketing and search engine optimization, they will start to see why they need to be marketing on the internet.

The final reason that local business owners should consider internet marketing is that the internet is how people find businesses these days. People no longer open up the yellow pages or flip open a newspaper to find a certain type of business. Instead, they pull out their cell phone, punch in a search term into Google, and see what businesses are suggested to them. This trend has been growing more and more over recent years, especially with the huge increases in the use of mobile web technology. The real truth of the matter is that, if a business doesn’t start consider online marketing, they won’t just find it difficult to grow their business, they could actually start to lose business as their competitors find ways to attract customers over the internet.

04 November 2010

Online Reputation Management for Local

By: Category: Blog, Reputation Management Comments: 3

When a good client of mine took on an account that become a problem account, before they knew it they were receiving 28 voice mails very two hour of yelling and screaming. I was told “FIX IT”.

Upon my initial research, I uncovered that this is expensive and that the right systems should have been put in place in the first place. In any event, what I learned there is VERY little on the Internet in terms of a strategy for Online Reputation Management. There is A LOT in terms of content for explanation of this, but little for execution.

After two months of studying and recognizing that this is information that needs to out there, I decided to implement and test Online Reputation Management and Online Response Management for a Local Business.

In any event, I’ve created a very high level overview strategy. You bet your dollar that we’re on top of this and have tested, or are continuing to test, to create the best strategy for any, and almost all locally based businesses.

I orginally posted this on the Local Biz Builders forum here.

Online Response Management Strategy Overview

1.Monitoring Online Reputation complaints and inventory complaints and put system in Place
a.Twitter, Blogs, Forums, News, *Complaint Sites (like complaintnow.com, ripoffreport.com), Facebook, Yelp, Citysearch, Yahoo Local, Angie’s List, OpenTable and Epinions
i.TweetDeck
ii.Google Alerts
iii.Monitor This allows you to monitor and track keywords over multiple search engines.
iv.Domain Ranking for keywords (I use market samurai and WebCEO – free trial for both)
v.Manual searches using search engine tools ([allintitle: company name] – check blogs, forums, web 2.0, [site:www.facebook.com company name]
b.Inventory Negative PR –create inventory file, one week dated
c.Email – update website email flow for customer service, ops, sales

2.Push Down complaint sites off front page for search phrase [COMPANY NAME] – via SEO (Web 2.0 content works great). Create 2-3 sites with COMPANYNAME in domain (.org, .net, COMPANYNAME-reviews.com)

3.Respond to negative complaints online within 24 hours
a.Twitter, complaint boards, forums, email
i.Copy and paste responses – there are 4-6 catagories.
b.Need to track what we do.

4.Remove online complaints
a.Complaint boards, Wikipedia, (manual removal is very difficult and time consuming, better to direct to customer)
b.ReputationDefender.com – A service that attempts to help you get things being said online about you removed

5.Publish Positive Content (updated phase II to aid in this)
a.Blogs, forums, web 2.0, local reviews sites, complaint boards,
b.Blog Strategy on COMPANYNAME (weekly CEO voice, weekly customer service voice, COMPANY video content) – Implement Share features – T & FB
c.Ideas for content that would be shared among our courier industry – funny video, reports, industry analysis, (such as an extensive blog post), be the ‘camera person’ at events.

6.PR Campaign

24 October 2010

A Summary of Beginner Strategies for Driving Traffic to Small Business Websites

By: Category: Search Engine Marketing Comments: 1

There are an almost limitless number of ways that you can drive traffic to a business website online. The problem is that it can be difficult for the beginner to know where to start. With so many options available to them, the beginning online marketer, without any real internet marketing training, can easily become overwhelmed by the number of options that they have available to them. The other problem is that the ways for getting traffic range from the extremely simple to the extremely complicated. In order to make it easier for beginning small business marketers to get started, the following is a summary of some simple traffic strategies that even the total internet beginner can try.

First, you should engage in some basic SEO on your website. SEO stands for search engine optimization. In order to get your site to show up in search engines like Google when people search for certain phrases, there are a few things you’re going to need to do. These strategies also range from the extremely complicated to the simple, but the simple ones are easy enough that anyone can do them.

First, it can be very beneficial if you include your keywords in the page titles of your website. If you’re not programming your site yourself, you should mention that to your web designer. Next, you should make sure that your keywords are liberally sprinkled throughout the content of your site. Finally, you should make sure that your site is updated with useful information regularly, as the search engines like sites that have new content added regularly.

The next thing that any beginner can do is submit themselves to some directories to try and get their sites listed. This provides backlinks, which are links back to your own page from other websites. Some of these are free, like DMOZ, while others, like the Yahoo! business directory, you may have to pay for. Directory submissions are very simple though, and serve the double benefit of providing you with a listing that people may follow directly to your site. You will also get a back link which will boost your performance in the search engines.

Another very simple way to start getting traffic to your website is to include a link to your website in all of your emails. Most people send several emails every day, but there is a good chance that many of the people that you send emails to have probably never visited your business website before. The easiest way to include the link is to simply build a signature into your email program so that, with every email that you send, a link to your website will be included at the bottom of the message.

The social networking sites are also a very good source of traffic. The great thing about using sites like Twitter and Facebook as business promotion sites is that most people are already familiar with them through personal use. Unlike learning the ins and outs of SEO or PPC advertising, promoting your site through the social networks doesn’t require any additional expertise. Also, if you have a large personal network built on those sites, you can use your personal profile to suggest that friends follow or like your new business profiles. This can, in turn, drive traffic to your actual business site.

A final easy way to drive traffic to a small business website is by starting a blog. Blogs are easy to set up, and easy to update. Even completely new users to the internet can figure out how to run a blog quickly. Blogs can quickly build up a following which can drive substantial traffic to your site, as well as earn you valuable back links.

23 October 2010

Pros and Cons of Yellow Pages vs. Internet Advertising

By: Category: Local Business Marketing Comments: 5

A small business is only going to have so much available money to devote to their advertising. This is why small business owners quite often do a lot of research before purchasing advertising. Because they have limited funds, they want to make sure that they are going to get the best return on their investment for every advertising dollar that they spend. Many small business owners go as far as actually taking an internet marketing course so that they can try to figure out whether or not they should move their advertising money away from traditional advertising like the yellow pages and into new media on the internet.

First, let us look at the pros of Yellow Pages advertising. The distribution is excellent on this type of advertising. Essentially, everyone in your city is going to receive a phone book which is going to have your ad in it. This gives you good market penetration and allows you to reach a wide potential customer base. Another pro in favor of the Yellow Pages is that it is a trusted source. People feel comfortable calling a business they find in the phone book, and building trust is a key to making sales.

There are also several pros to be seen when looking at internet advertising. The most obvious of these is cost. Advertising on the internet is cheaper than anywhere else by far. For a much lower cost your ad has the potential to reach far more people. The other pro is that it is much quicker to get started on a marketing campaign. If you decide you need to ramp up business with an ad buy online, you can get moving immediately. Phone books ads are only available during the printing cycle of the book, so you can have a much longer lead time before any response is generated.

Now, for the cons of Yellow Pages advertising, the most obvious of these is the cost. The cost of an ad in this format when compared to an internet ad is not going to provide you with very good value for your dollar. If you were to compare the prices in terms of how many people would see your ad per dollar spent, the online advertising will almost always provide better value. Also, as already discussed, there can be a long lead time on getting your ad live when placing it in the Yellow Pages.

There are a few cons to internet advertising as well. One of the problems here is that it can be difficult to know where to spend your money online. As the web has grown exponentially over the last several years, it can now be almost impossible to know what the best way to spend your advertising dollars is unless you’re an expert in online marketing. The other possible con of purchasing online advertising of certain types has to do with the unpredictability of traffic online. Your investment may run out quicker than you anticipated, since ads are usually purchased on a per click or per impression basis rather than for a set period of time.

While these two types of advertising may at first appear to be somewhat balanced, there is a very large pro in favor of internet advertising which hasn’t been mentioned yet. This is that internet advertising can be cumulative. As your site spends more time online, and as you drive more traffic to it through your advertising, the search engine’s trust in your site will grow, and the benefits of each advertising campaign will slowly build upon each other. This snowball effect of advertising is not likely to be achieved through more traditional Yellow Pages advertising.


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