It is pretty likely that you have already discovered that the current market requires a different type of advertising than print ads, landing radio spots and doing home shows during the weekend hours to garner the profits that you want and need. Why is this? The market dynamics have always been in a state of flux, but recent and dramatic changes have made it necessary for business owners to do far more. Shoppers are exercising far more caution than ever before and now they are doing a ton more research before purchasing in order to ensure that they get the very best deals on the very best products.
The question is, “Where are they doing their research?” You guessed it … The internet. But having a website alone is simply not enough. You will obviously need a website in order for potential customers to locate you. But this alone won’t cut it.
Several studies have show that 90% of internet users that are on the hunt for goods or services never make it beyond page one. It is important for you to consider how many times you yourself have gone looking for something on Google, and how often you have actually scrolled beyond the results on page one. Like most people, you probably only very rarely look beyond the very first page of results.
What this really means is that if your company does no have a page one listing, your prospect will not find you. Worse than even this, there is a ton of time, resources and money that you have invested in website creation that will never make it to full potential. The majority of your potential customer will never even get to see it!
By now you are well informed about the importance of marketing to the success of your business. The problem is that when you only use the traditional “offline” lead generation and marketing strategies like the ones described above, you are definitely working twice as hard for less than half of the results. The time has come to start taking advantage of Internet marketing and all that it has to offer.
Willie Sutton, a bank robber of tremendous infamy was once asked why he’d chosen to rob banks. His easy yet adequate response was, “Because that’s where the money is.” It just so happens that when it comes to your local business, it is now becoming pretty clear where all of the money is. It’s on the internet!
These Are The 7 Simple Steps To Internet Marketing Success For Your Small Business
Step 1 – Create a website – It’s hard to believe, but yes, some small business owners still don’t have their own website. If you are one of those small businesses, I can almost guarantee that no matter how successful you are today, without a website, your days are numbered. Sorry to be so blunt, but that’s the reality.
Hire a good website designer and you can have a basic site up in less than a week. And please, don’t have your son’s high school friend create the site. Hire a professional who knows as much about business as they do about websites. You never get a second chance to make a first impression, so spend a little more and get it done right.
Step2 – Use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Keyword Research – There is no point in building a website unless you can attract visitors. The biggest source of traffic for most sites are search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN (Bing).
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a strategy that business owners use to improve their on-page or on-site content and coding so that the site can become more relevant to the search engine for a particular niche or set of keywords. Employing SEO strategies will assist in increasing visitor traffic because the website will begin to rank higher in Search Engine Results Pages or SERPS.
Ongoing strategic and effective search engine optimization can continually improve your rankings month after month, year after year. SEO help you achieve long lasting search engine ranking status because your listing appears in the “natural” or “organic” listings where 80% of all the clicks take place.
The Importance of Keywords – Understanding and identifying the keywords that your potential customers “type in” is a major factor to online success. In addition to these keywords, it is important to use a geo-local strategy to include town names near your business. This powerful combination should be the foundation for all your other lead generating traffic strategies as well.
Usually the keywords that seem the most obvious at the outset tend not to be equal in their effectiveness. A few are definitely worth ranking for while other will generate a tone of traffic but will also show themselves as hard to convert. In the world of keywords that are “research keywords” and “buying keywords”. It is important to understand that different search terms are typically used at different stages of the buying process, because all business owners should be prepared to choose wisely.
Step 3 – Start Driving Pre-Qualified Traffic Directly to Your Site – There is a brand range of way to start driving traffic to your site. Some of the common methods cost very little in terms of actual cash, while there are other that will need to be budgeted due to their more sophisticated and complex nature and design. I have listed down below those that I consider to be the most effective and efficient online strategies for driving traffic to your business.
Video Marketing – Video marketing happens to be a highly effective marketing tool of local businesses that has been providing phenomenal results for years. In fact it is one of the secrets of your competitors that they really do not want you to know about. Why is this? Because they have learned that this is a powerful and effective marketing tool. We have several times landed our clients a Google page one ranking in less than six hours.
Link Building – Hear what Google has to say about it… – “Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher Page-Rank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results. Webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.”
Essentially each back-link is counted as a vote that attests to the quality of your company’s website. This process is essentially based upon the logic that the more sites that are choosing to link to you, the better your own site must be.
Because of this, an effective way to easily begin to improve your search engine ranking is to start creating a strong base of back-links. The strategies that I implement to create back-links for my clients include: Press Releases, Article Marketing, Social Bookmarking and Document Sharing Sites. By integrating all 4 you can make the most of this incredible tool.
Social Media Marketing – More than 40% of the most commonly visited sites in the United States are social medial sites. These sites include YouTube, Twitter and Facebook among many more. This is a stellar method of brand promotion, product and and service promotion. You can make your company and your presence know using a host of different social media networks.
You will need an entirely new set of skills to start pulling traffic to your site using these websites. Although they are free to join they take different kinds of strategies for success than do more traditional forms of marketing. When you use social media marketing for your business there will be a significant investment of time when it comes to “tweets and posts”. When you learn how to use this system effectively however, it pays off in customers, sales and profits.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC) – If you budget allows for this level of advertising you can run company adds using Google AdWords, MSN or Yahoo. With this method of advertising the focus is on bidding for the leading or top position on the search engine results.
Businesses accomplish this by bidding or outright buying keyword phrases that are relevant to their services or goods. The higher the bid, the higher the spot on the advertising or sponsored section of the related search results. On Google these listing will appear at the top and right side of the page.
Each time a visitor will click through to their website the PPC advertiser must pay their bid price. There is no cost for setting up a Google AdWords account, but it is imperative to understand the basics of setting up and implementing effective campaigns, companies ads and tracking and conversion methods. Not knowing will prove expensive in terms of time, resources and money.
On the other hand, a well designed adwords strategy can drive a lot of traffic and significantly increase sales and profits.
Blogging – Blogging is a highly effective tool that any business or business owner can use to reach out to customers and potential customers in a personal way. Bloggers can make their marketing efforts far more personal and allow reader to get a more insightful look at the business. One of the best benefits that blogging has to offer is that search engines are constantly on the hunt for new, insightful and relevant content. The more that you use your blog and the more keyword dense your posts are, the higher the likelihood that you will be both found and read.
Directories For Local Search Engines – Many search engines such as Google and other will usually provide a map with between 7 and 10 listings of the businesses that best relate to keywords and search terms that have been entered in by the user. This is quite often the very first place that computer users will go when they are trying to locate a local business.
It is a high objective to get a first page placement on the maps sections of a particular search engine. You can do this by creating and claiming your company maps profile. These are all free to set up but the process can wind up becoming very time consuming and frustrating when it is not done properly.
Step 4 – Turn Web Traffic Into Leads – Each and everything that you do on or within your site should have one main objective – turn your visitors in leads and paying customers. The only sure way of accomplishing this is by scoring their contact information. You want to get at the very minimum a first name and a valid e-mail address.
Website “surfers” behave rather impulsively on the Internet, so much so that many times they easily forget where they were even 10 web pages ago. That’s why it is so critical to convert as many first time visitors as possible…and quickly!
The foremost way to transition a visitor to a lead is by requesting a name and email address. You can use a standard opt-in form to do this. There are several different stages of visitor conversion. These are:
*Website visitor to lead
*Lead to client
*From client to referral marketing innovator
Each and every stages will require a different strategy. Which ones are you implementing?
Step 5 – Organize and Implement A Follow Up Marketing System – After getting visitors to join your mailing list, they will be wanting and expecting you to provide them follow-up information and offers. The fastest and most efficient way of doing this is through newsletters and other forms of e-mail marketing. This is because you can simply compose and customize and e-mail and then broadcast it to thousands of recipients in almost no time at all!
The advantages of using e-newsletters to do your follow up marketing is:
*It will help you build lasting relationships that foster trust. This is what will generate profits.
*It keeps you and your company at top of mind (TOM) levels. This means that you will be the first business that those on your mailing list members will think of the very next time that they need a product or service like yours.
Step 6 – Generate An Effective Referral Marketing System – Many small business owners become so conditioned to closing the next deal that they often forget the stellar resource that the current customer base can be when used effectively. Very little tends to happen at many companies following the transition of a prospect to customer. Often these individuals are all but ignored in terms of marketing time, resources and money.
Seriously, think about your own business – do you have a referral marketing SYSTEM and budget in place right now? Most don’t and that is such a shame and a missed opportunity to increase your sales and profits.
Step 7 – Track Your Results and Continuing Improve – Analyzing your web traffic statistics can be an invaluable tool for a number of different reasons. The aim is to use the web traffic statistics to figure out how well or how poorly your site is working for you and your visitors.
Web traffic statistic work to determine the ineffective and effective areas of your site. This includes the keywords that are used to find you, where you visitors go once they reach your website and the amount of time that they are actually spending on a page.
These are the statistic that will serve to reveal very necessary information regarding the effectiveness and efficiency of your individual pages as well as visitor motivation and visitor habits. You will find that this information is essential yo every successful internet marketing campaign.
And there it is – your 7 easy strategies for Local Business Marketing Success. By simply investing a little earnest effort into these important steps you will surely increase your rankings with popular search engines, start driving more qualified traffic you your website and converting more prospective customers. This will definitely increase both sales and profits. It is important to get started now though, because your competitors are reading this information too!
For those individuals that are interested in local business marketing, you should definitely take a look at Internet marketing for small business. These opportunities are something you should review.