As I’m sure you’ve already discovered, local business marketing now takes more than your typical newspaper ad, radio spot and weekend home show to get the sales you used to get. Why? Because the dynamics of the market have changed dramatically. Consumers are more cautious than ever and are doing more research to be sure they are getting the best products and services at the best possible price.
Local Business Marketing Stats
And where are they going to do their research – you guessed it…the Internet. And if you think that just having a website is enough, you are sadly mistaken. You obviously need your website to be found by your prospects.
But, according to some studies, 90% of people searching for products and services on the Internet never search beyond page one. Take a moment to think about how many times search for something on Google and how many times you actually go past page one during your search. If you’re like most, not too many times. This is critical for local business marketing.
That means that for all practical purposes, if you’re not on page one, your prospects will never find you! To make matters worse, take a look at all the time money and resources you’ve already spent creating that beautiful website that 90% of your potential clients and customers will never see. How frustrating!
You already know how important local business marketing is the success of your business. But, if you’re only using the traditional “offline” marketing and lead generation strategies described above, then you’re working twice as hard for half the results. Now it’s time to work on your local business marketing.
When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton a famous bank robber simply replied, “Because that’s where the money is.” Well guess where the money is for your local business? The Internet!
Local Business Marketing – 7 STeps to 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.
Step 2 – 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).
SEO or search engine optimization is a local business marketing strategy used to improve the on-site or on-page content and coding of your website in order to become more relevant to the search engines for your niche and keywords. Implementing SEO strategies will help increase visitor traffic because your site will rank higher in the Search Engine Results Pages (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 local business marketing lead generating traffic strategies as well.
But keywords that appear to be obvious at the outset are not equal in effectiveness. Some are certainly worth ranking for while others will bring you lots of traffic but that will be hard to convert. In the “keyword world”, there are what’s commonly referred to as “research keywords” and “buying keywords”. Different keyword search terms are used at different points of the buying process so you need to be sure you chose wisely.
Step 3 – Drive Qualified Traffic to Your Website – There are many ways to drive traffic to your website, some cost you little in terms of actual cash, while others are more sophisticated and complicated and will need to be budgeted. I have listed below what I consider to be the most effective online strategies to drive traffic.
Video Marketing – This local business marketing tool has been helping small business owners for years. It’s the secret your competitors don’t want you to know about. Why? Because they know the power of this incredible tool. We have gotten Google page one ranking for some of our clients in under 6 hours!
Link Building – According to Google – “Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank 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.”
For all practical purposes, these ‘backlinks’ are counted as ‘votes’ regarding the quality of your website, and is based on the logic that the more websites that are actually linking too you, the better your local business marketing website must be.
Due to this, one of the ways to start improving your website’s search engine results is to start building up a reliable base of backlinks. The local business marketing strategies I use to build backlinks for my clients include: Article Marketing, Press Releases, Document Sharing Sites and Social Bookmarking. When you integrate all 4, it can be very powerful.
Social Media Marketing – Over 40% of the most visited websites in the USA are social media sites. These include Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and more. Social media marketing is a method of promoting your brand, product, service or company by making your presence known via a variety of social media networks.
Although joining these websites is free, using them to market your business and drive traffic to your website requires a new set of skills not used in traditional forms of marketing. Using social media marketing does require an investment in time in terms of “tweets and posts”, but for those using it effectively, it can pay off in terms of new customers
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising – If you have the money to pay for the advertising, you can run ads on Google Adwords, MSN or Yahoo. PPC advertising is all about bidding for the top or leading position on search engine results page and listings.
Advertisers do this by buying or bidding on keyword phrases that are relevant to their products or services – the higher the bid, the higher the spot in the sponsored or advertising section on the search results. These sponsored ads appear on the top and right side Google.
PPC advertisers then pay their bid price every time a visitor clicks through the website. Setting up a Google Adwords account is free, but not knowing the local business marketing “in and outs” of setting up effective campaigns, ads, tracking and conversion methods can cost your company a lot of wasted time, money and resources.
On the other hand, a well designed local business marketing adwords strategy can drive a lot of traffic and significantly increase sales and profits.
Blogging - Local business marketing Blogs provide a unique vehicle for any business or business owner to reach out to clients and prospects in a more personal way. Marketing becomes more personal and people get to see a different side of the business. The best part about blogs is that the search engines are always looking for fresh and relevant content so the more you blog relevant keyword rich posts, the more likely it is you’ll be found and read.
Local Search Engine Directories – Google and other search engines will often provide a map with 7 – 10 listings of the top businesses related to search terms or keywords that are typed in by the user. Many times this is the first place consumers look at when trying to find a local business.
One of your local business marketing objectives is to get first page placement in the maps section. This is done by creating and claiming your company maps profile. And although these profiles are free to set up, the process can be very time consuming and cumbersome if not done correctly.
Step 4 – Convert Website Visitors into Leads – Everything you do on your site should have one overriding objective – turning visitors into leads and leads into sales! The only way to verifiably do this is to capture their contact information – at minimum first name and 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!
And the best way to convert a visitor to a lead is by asking for their name and email address through an opt-in form. Visitor conversion has different stages including…
*Website visitor to lead
*Lead to customer
*Customer to referral marketing “evangelist”
Each of these stages requires a different strategy. What’s yours?
Step 5 – Create a Follow Up Marketing System – Once you get local business marketing website visitors to “opt-in” to your mailing list, they want and expect you to send them information and offerings. One of the fastest, easiest and most effective ways to follow up with your prospects and current clients is through e-mail marketing and newsletters. Why? Because all you do is compose an e-mail, customize it to suit your readers and niche and click the broadcast button to reach thousands of people instantly!
The advantages of using local business marketing e-newsletters to do your follow up marketing is:
*It builds long lasting relationships. Relationships that foster trust and trust that makes you money
*It keeps you top of mind (TOM), so you’re the first person your e-mail list members think of next time they want or need what your products and services.
Step 6 – Create a Referral Marketing System – As small business owners, we are so conditioned to closing the next deal, that we forget what a great resource our current customer base is! You know what happens at many companies after a prospect finally does become a customer, not much! Many times, they are all but ignored in terms of local business marketing marketing time, money and resources.
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 local business marketing 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 stats can help you determine effective and ineffective areas of your website including keywords used to find you, where visitors go once they get to your site and how much time they actually spend on each page.
These statistics will reveal vital information about the effectiveness of individual pages, and visitor habits and motivation. This is essential information to any successful Internet marketing campaign.
So there you have it – your 7 steps to Local Business Marketing. If you follow these important steps, you are sure to increase your search engine rankings, drive more traffic to website, convert more prospects and of course increase your sales and profits. But you better get going, because your competition is reading this article too!
Topic: Local Business Marketing
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