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How to Sell Internet Marketing

By: admin22.6.2010 Comments: 1

When you approach a business offering them local business marketing services, what do you think the first thing on their mind is? Believe it or not, it’s not always money. The first thing that most people want to know is just how much you can offer them in terms of knowledge and leverage against their competition. Once you demonstrate what you know and how you can position them, the focus shifts to cost.

Understanding your customer is one of the most important aspects of marketing and it should never be forgotten. To understand your customer’s needs for local business marketing services, you must first understand what products or services they offer. You must then understand your client’s customers. What type of target audience are they aiming their marketing at? Can this be expanded?

Next, you want to understand their competition. Now, this will take some research on your part, but it will be well worth it to impress your potential client. What type of marketing is the competition using? What type of rank do they have with the search engines? Take notes on this information so that you can present it to your clients and show them what they are missing. This will usually instill a sense of urgency, so don’t be surprised when the quiet business owner all of the sudden starts pounding you with questions. That’s just the business owner’s competitive nature taking over. It’s also your queue to show them precisely what you can do to boost their clientele and overall profit.

If the client is focused on local business marketing services, then you should definitely make it a point to discuss a long term SEO campaign, blogging, social networking, and PPC campaign. Not all business owners will be privy to the PPC, and that’s understandable as it can be quite expensive. For these businesses, explain how PPC ads will give them presence and show them that they can start small.

Every business is different, as is every business owner. You are going to have to be able to relate to each every step of the way if you want their business. For this reason, it is important that you are able to create a variety of marketing options for every price range. The startup isn’t going to be able to afford as much as the established business, but over time that will change. Show them how it can change by showing them the numbers.

The most important thing to remember when you are attempting to sell your Internet marketing services is that you know your stuff. Your potential clients are going to ask you questions and you have to be prepared to answer them. If you tell them, “I don’t know,” then that instills the doubt that you will be able to perform the services that they need. This is why it is important to do your homework. Put yourself in their shoes and consider what it is that they want before you even pitch your services. This will prove to them that you can be trusted with their business.

Reviews Make (or Break) Online Local Marketing

By: admin22.6.2010 Comments: 0

Businesses can rely on online local marketing for growth and expansion. The Internet, being a medium that can reach millions of people around the world, is a great marketing tool. It can be used to efficiently disseminate information, process business orders, and as a way for corporate communication. Promotional media can be sent to a large number of people within minutes, without wasting resources like in the physical way of media distribution.

In online local marketing, reputation is a big factor that really weighs in the buyer’s eyes. A good business reputation, as portrayed by excellent reviews, has the capacity to surge sales and income. On the other hand, reviews, especially those from consumers which are bad and unappealing, can break your business strategies. Obviously, negative reviews result in the negative portrayal of your business. In that case, you can expect a drop in sales, and investors will choose not to risk their money with your business.

If you choose to market your business by building a website, you should assess the overall appeal of your business, your products or your services, and your target clientele. It may be risky to put up a review system on your site, but the absence of such will convey a message that you’re trying to hide something. After all, there are independent websites online that are solely focused on compiling reviews for different establishments, be it a restaurant, a salon, or a day spa. All in all, it is wise to place one on your site because it allows your potential clients to see the experiences that others have had. If you are proactive, you can choose to kindly respond to all feedback with a “Thanks!” for good feedback and a solution for negative feedback, such as “Thanks for bringing this to our attention. Rest assured this will be addressed.”

The important thing to remember in online local marketing is that you should assume every customer or client who tries your product or service is a judge that will decide whether or not your business is good enough for their money. The trick to get good reviews, aside from making your services and products topnotch, is making the experience personalized and specific for each and every client. The cost and competitiveness of your products or services is only second to its worth. Remember, cost and worth is different from each other. Reviews that reflect great worth is like a medal for your business. Future clients will see these and base their decisions on them.

The review system in your online local marketing strategy should be easy and convenient to use for the customers. You may choose to give a preset numerical system that will help the critique judge your business. Some choose to use a simple comment or feedback system. This may work, but setting criteria to help them on their reviews is generally better.

All in all, for the growth of your local business, set up a review system. If you are not guilty of offering shoddy products or services, reviews will be your lifelong companion. Maximize your online local marketing plans and see how reviews can make a big difference to your business.

Learn Local Internet Marketing

By: Scott Gallagher9.6.2010 Comments: 2

Local Internet Marketing is merely marketing a business online. Most businesses, unless they begin online, are local. For example, a local bakery may service a small community and an airline may service an entire country, or a few countries. These businesses have borders. However, generally speaking when referencing local internet marketing, one considers a business that provides products or services locally, dealing directly with customers, sometimes face to face. These businesses typically have other marketing vehicles to drive patients, clients and customers and consider investing money and effort into driving more business from the Internet.

Almost all businesses these days can benefit from marketing online. There are several options to pursue business from search marketing to social media marketing. These follow traditional marketing principles, from push to pull marketing. The Internet is merely another vehicle to gain business exposure to the target audience.

Whether you’re a local business owner, manager or consultant aspiring to learn to provide such services, proper education in this field is critical and one needs to learn local internet marketing.

An entrepreneur or business manager must have the education to learn how to manage those executing the various services, knowledge in knowing which strategies work and where to invest their budget.

There are experts vying to provide their education that don’t have the fundamental marketing principles to relate the computer era of marketing to basic principles of human psychology. There is such a vast array of information that provides false promises of instant rankings and systems that are fail proof. Many people are becoming rich selling information that simply does not work, or has worked for a short time to fool the search engines. Someone promises a system that instantly provides 1000’s of followers, people who are waiting by their computer for you to speak so you instantly will get leads.

It doesn’t happen. Ever. Never has, never will.

Listen to your gut. In a perfect world, the businesses that provided the best service for the best price and was able to sustain such a level of service in exchange for a fair profit, should flourish. Those companies that continue to get repeat customers, the ones that get the most word of mouth advertising should grow. Not because of large marketing budgets, or political influence. Businesses should grow because they continually strive the be the best at what they do, not to have the largest bottom line. The money usually follows.

So, why can’t this perfect business world be created online? Eliminate the corporate push, provide a democratic playing field for everyone.

It is being created, however it is not perfect. There are always thieves, scammers, crooks, short-cutters, those that want the easy road. The framework for this perfect business promotion world is here, it just needs some tweaking.

See, a local business can be found in a search engine, preferably number one for a relevant keyword. A company can thrive on Twitter and get a great following or run a very successful profitable advertising campaign. This business can flourish for the short term by exploiting the many vulnerabilities these online advertising avenues currently hold. However, as a search engine for example improves it’s search results, such as yesterday’s announcement of caffeine, such strategies begin to lose it’s effectiveness.

People devise these strategies simply by trial and error and then this information get’s distributed around the Internet as the Holy Grail of strategies. These are essentially reserved engineered. The motivation is simply to trick a search engine into showing what it thinks is the right result. You need to learn these online marketing strategies, understand what strategies exist, which work and those basic marketing strategies that work online, offline and for decades.

Bottom line is that considering what the Internet as a whole is and what companies like Google are really trying to do, then acquiring results is challenging. Their suggestions merely are much more challenging than the strategies the experts have devised. The thing is, following exactly what a search engine wants us to do is a lot of hard work, effort and dedication, these are the results that yield the longest term results. There are really two words that best describe online marketing for a local business, Transparency and Exposure.

Consider the Marketing Local Business Online coaching course to learn more about marketing a business online, regardless if you’re a business owner, manager or consultant.

Local Marketing – 7 Tips to Local Online and Offline Marketing

By: Scott Gallagher20.5.2010 Comments: 1

1. Google Local Business Center Promotion

Having your business found in the Google local business Center when prospects are using search engines to find businesses like yours is likely single most important source of traffic that you can convert to a desirable call to action such as picking up the phone call you to set an appointment or buy that pizza.

There are many factors that are involved in the search engine like Google looks at when it decides whether or not display local business listing for business. It really comes down to two major factors, and those are citations and reviews. Considering how traditional businesses have evolved and grown over the years, word-of-mouth advertising and quality exposure are the two key ingredients to success. Google and the rest of the search engines have merely mimicked these two key ingredients into a digital form. For example, a review of the business on the Internet is very similar to local people talking about that business, word-of-mouth advertising. Citation by local publication such as a newspaper and then printed online is the type of exposure that will help build any local business in the off-line or online world.

While there are likely dozens of factors to influence the rankings of your local business Center results, there is a small handful of factors that represent the greatest weight in your ranking. Click the link to learn more about the on the page triggers for results with local businesses.

2. Have a Website

While It Is Very Possible for Any Local Business to promote themselves using Internet without a website, it is definitely not recommended. Likely the most important point when considering this recommendation is how the lack of a website will radically affect perception of your business. These days websites are very inexpensive when considering the return you can get on that website.

Websites for small local businesses have been resisted for the last 15 years and have been perceived as a digital online brochure. In fact, we keep Wikipedia defines a business website is a website used to provide background information about business, organization or service. This is completely wrong. A business website should be intended to provide interaction and value to all the different audience members that would frequent that website. For example, customers of local businesses frequently visit websites to achieve called action, such as make an inquiry, find the phone number, ask a question, look for information, provide comments or testimonials. It is not difficult to build a high-quality website for a local business that is not over the top, will interact with the different audience groups visiting that site and maximize the conversion on that website to a call to action. Any local businesses that are considering marketing themselves on the Internet should consider having their website looked at by a professional to provide advice on how to improve the conversion. Consider a marketing agency like the CCS, they provide free website assessments.

3. Promote that Website

Think of your website as the race car and the promotion as the driver. Until you put a driver in the drivers seat, and hit the gas, your website will not perform at all. It is a clear fact that the search engine will drive more traffic to a website in every other possible medium combined. As of writing this post, Google has over 85% of the US market share in terms of searches for local businesses. It is also a fact that 43% of all searches on Google are of local nature (comScore). 61% of these searches result in an off-line purchase (comScore). Bottom line, you need to be found in the right places on Google in order to promote your local business online.

There are likely hundreds of different methods to be able to promote the business website online which include search engine optimization, local business results optimization, pay per click advertising, banner advertising, joint ventures, e-mail marketing social media marketing to name a few. While search engine optimization is likely more expensive than the website itself, this is a service that literally promote your website enough that Google will rank your website very high on the front page for your targeted keywords. You cannot pay Google for this.

Just like in the off-line world, online marketing follows the same principles. Efforts need to be put forth to create transparency and exposure for the business. By exposing a local businesses website on other websites and engaging in online conversations relating to that business, will create this exposure. Some experts say the website needs inbound links. Think of a link to your website like handing out your business card. You can hand out 100 business cards at the local mall or handout 20 business cards at your local Chamber of Commerce. Each scenario might cost you three hours of your time. In almost every case, it is likely that handing out 20 business cards at the local Chamber of Commerce will yield you greater return on your investment of time. The Internet is no different. By exposing your website, or getting links from other websites, it is absolutely not the quantity of links. It is definitely the quality of where that business is exposed.

4. Targeted E-Mail Marketing Campaign

It has been said by many experts to quality e-mail marketing campaigns result in the greatest return on investment for any online marketing efforts. Never in the history of marketing have we ever seen a medium that yields a return greater than $40 per dollar spent.

In our opinion, every local business should have processes and systems in place to acquire a quality e-mail marketing following. By putting efforts forward to create a quality unique list, over the years that business has an asset that is highly valuable. By spending a few hours per month that business can communicate a message to a large targeted audience like they’ve never been able to do before. The cost of creating each e-mail is merely the time invested in creating an e-mail and then hitting the send button. This can be done as many times as one would like.

A quality targeted e-mail marketing campaign helps build trust, loyalty and authority towards the local business. There are many opportunities to be able to offer a unique selling proposition for the local business with e-mail marketing, much more than national chains.

5. Get Social

For the last two years we have seen significant growth and buzz with companies like Twitter and Facebook. For the most part Facebook and twitter are being used for consumer applications not so much for local businesses. It is also argued that in the beginning of 2010 there is still a lot of speculation on how these Web 2.0 properties are going to help local businesses. We don’t believe that the question is if, but the question is how.

Consider the facts of human nature. We are social beings. We thrive on evolution. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, social media is really the very first property on the Internet that addresses our second most fundamental need of human beings. This need is called in need of safety, were humans require security of body, employment, a rally, the family and property. The next need is the need of love and belonging of friendship, family and intimacy. This is likely the most fundamental basic reason why these websites have thrived in the last couple of years as these websites have addressed deeper human needs.

Every business sell something. Every business has relationships involved with it. These relationships are with other humans in and now technology has facilitated a new medium to communicate and receive this love, belonging and safety. It is not surprising the adoption rate that Americans have for their beloved Facebook. In fact, this is true globally. Therefore there is no question that social media plays a part in business transactions.

There are many theories and strategies on how to promote a business using Web 2.0 properties. While many of these strategies are currently unproven, the business still needs to be present and interact. Every local business should have a twitter profile that is used weekly, company blog to communicate messaging to their followers, Facebook presence with a Facebook page and key players in the business should be on LinkedIn.

6. Set up Joint Promotions with Other Businesses

One of the most important words in the business dictionary is called leverage. Someone once told me once that there is three ways to acquire new business. Get new customers. Get your customers to spend more frequently. Get your customers to spend more with each transaction. The first is the most difficult in the area that most people spend their time in to grow their business. A smart business owner figures out ways to leverage their existing customers to find new business opportunities.

There are many businesses in around your area. Or maybe associations in your industry. You might deal with other vendors or have different suppliers. The fact is many of these businesses are targeting the same customers that you are and have a different customer base then you. There are many different ways that one can leverage promotions with other businesses or associations to drive business your way.

7. Constantly Drive

Marketing any business online or off-line is exactly like paddling upstream. The moment you stop paddling you go back quicker than you were moving forward. Very rarely have businesses ever been built slightly marketed and continue to grow without the leaders of that business continuing to push and move that business continuing to innovate.

Once local business is built different marketing vehicles and systems to drive transparency and exposure, that business must continue to do that. If this transparency and exposure dries up, the Internet as a whole or more importantly the search engines, will consider that business they’ll and begin to drop their rankings. Sending out e-mails to prospects and stopping and starting again has significant impact on the business, as this is perceived as sloppiness and being unorganized. Starting a social campaign and being inaccessible for several days at a time indicates a lack of commitment. These are all very important perceptions your prospects and customers should not and cannot have about a business.

Local Business Opportunities

By: Scott Gallagher11.5.2010 Comments: 2

There are several opportunities to start a local business. First, let’s define a local business and exactly what types of opportunities this article discusses.

A local business is one that services a community with borders. For example, a dry cleaning shop which services a 3 mile radius or an airline that services one country. There are no clear definitions on what describes a local business, but recently the term local business on the Internet is beginning to describe how an offline business markets itself on the Internet. For example, an e commerce store or an information product sold via the Internet is entirely online, in most cases customers never meet a single person from the supplier, whereas a local business there are sometimes several belly to belly encounters.

Therefore to further describe a local business opportunity, that would explain how an offline business has several opportunities to market themselves using the Internet.

There is no question the opportunities in 2010. Most local niches are still completely untapped in most local markets. Even in the largest cities, it’s not difficult for local businesses to capture a market, like this New York Courier Service company.

Consider the following consumer behavior:
•    “70% of US household now use the Internet as an information source when shopping locally for products and services” (Kelsey Group)
•    31% of all business buyers turn to a Search Engine first when looking for a
•    locally based product or service
•    Product Research and Comparison shopping happens online, but 67% of those purchases happen offline (Accenture)
•    90% of purchases are made within 50 miles of a person’s home (Kelsey)

Consider the following local search data:
•    43% of all searches on the Google
•    network included a geographical identifier. o 86% of those people followed up with a phone call
•    61% of those people ended up making a purchase offline
•    25% of all commercial Internet Searches are conducted by users looking for Local Merchants (Kelsey)
•    35% of all Searches are ‘local’ (DM News)
•    84% of U.S. based Internet users performed local searches, or 129 million people, and were looking for a local business
•    Advertising spent for local search
•    $3 Billion in 2008 (Kelsey)
•    $13 Billion projected by 2010 (Forbes)

Marketing a local business online is not easy, but it’s simple. There are many channels to expose your business online, such as the search engines, social media sites like Facebook, email marketing and video marketing to name a few. Most, if not all of this is new to many local businesses, yet the demand is created and growing where there is little supply, both with local business’ exposure and the experts providing quality support. The opportunities for both right now are overwhelming.

Local Marketing Source is an online education portal providing high quality education by a faculty team who has a long standing history of success with marketing local businesses online. Albeit LMS is a for profit portal, there is an abundance of education spread through this blog and the free content delivered via email.

Seven Steps to Improve Your Website Conversion for Local Business

By: admin7.5.2010 Comments: 0

So, you have decided that your website is in need of website conversation, but you are unsure what areas of your site need the most work? It is crucial that a business on the World Wide Web know how to convert their site properly for business, along with how to sell SEO to optimize your site to get as many clients to visit as possible.

Many companies on the internet know little about how to sell SEO, so it is crucial for future business that these local companies find someone who has experience in how to sell SEO, along with knowledge of how to do proper website conversion. There is no hidden secret to proper website conversion; so many local businesses who pay close attention to their website can improve their leads or sales by following these simple seven steps alongside having an employee who knows how to sell SEO.

Step 1: Content

When creating the content for your site, remember that most readers on the Internet do not want to read an eBook. They want content that is lacking in fluff and that is quick and to the point about your product or services. Also, make sure that all content is written by someone that knows how to sell SEO for the most search engine optimization.

Step 2: Imagery

Remember to place images strategically on your website to go along with any content. This will help compliment the content that you place on your site. As before, make sure captions are written by someone who knows how to sell SEO to improve your search engine results.

Step 3: Browser Size

This is a much overlooked fact when making business websites. With the age of Internet capable cell phones, remember that users will be viewing your website on different sized screens, so make sure it looks appealing.

Step 4: Cross Browser Capability

Different clients use different browsers, so make sure your site works on the most popular browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla, etc. Many clients will just close a website that does not work in their browser since they will assume it is a problem with your website; not their browser.

Step 5: Color Choice

Pick colors that are soothing to the eyes, but also attract attention. You don’t want to have a color scheme that makes your clients uncomfortable and want to leave your site.

Step 6: Contact Information

Make sure that customers feel like they have a form of recourse if something goes wrong or they wish to contact you. Not having this information can confuse customers into believing you are scam.

Step 7: Stimuli

Out of all the steps, this is the one that will catch your future customer’s attention. Create visual stimuli or headings that will catch your customer’s eye. This can many times be the description that the client will find about your website in a search engine, so have headlines written by someone who knows how to sell SEO.

By following these simple steps, local businesses can easily improve their website conversion. These simple steps will save many local businesses both time and money.