Grow Your Business Using Social Media

By Scott Martin

Social Media has revolutionized how our culture interacts.  Some of those changes present opportunities for businesses to increase their online visibility, engage with customers and even drive new business.

To be really effective at using Social Media for your business, you should focus on the following priorities:

1) Establish Your Presence – There are numerous Social Media sites to choose from.  Most businesses should focus their efforts on Facebook, Twitter & Google+ as the primary places to start.  Each of these are highly relevant to both Google’s search algorithm (a key element of making sure you business is highly visible) and they have highly engaged and very large sets of users.   The key is to set all of these up in a way that comprehensively showcases the products and services offered.  It is not enough to just setup a Plumbing Contractor profile.  You must also explain all the services you offer and do so in a way that uses the keywords that would be used by a prospective new customer.  So a plumber would obviously highlight their plumbing services capabilities, but would also discuss hot water heaters, sewer line inspection and clean-out, faucets & fixtures, septic tank installation and pumping as well as Emergency Services offered (to name a few).

2) Build an Audience – Now that your presence is established, you must focus on getting as many of that sites users as possible to connect to your business.  On Facebook, this is a “Like”, on Twitter it is a “Follower” and on Google+ it is people connected in your “Circles”.  Each of these connections is essentially and “opt-in” for your content and marketing.  There are a variety of ways to build an audience, but the most crucial is for you to generate engaging and useful content that makes people want to connect with you.  Generating content that is helpful, useful and attractive or magnetic is the key.  You have to resist the temptation to sell… no one uses social media to be sold to, so you have to be strategic about your content.  Generating content that explains the benefits of tankless hot water heaters might be considered helpful and educational.  Generating a tweet that reminds followers it is time to change the filters in your Air Conditioning units and simultaneously offering a $25 coupon for those very same services would likely be considering informative and special (due to the coupon).

3) Create Marketing Campaigns – Now that you have a base of connections, start to think through specific marketing campaign goals.  Initially, for example, one of your campaigns could be focused on getting more followers on Twitter, while later it could be to drive new business sales through your Twitter audience.  So, as you start to think through campaigns, get creative.  If you want users to do something for you (like share your post with their friends, family and connections (thereby extending its’ reach), entice them to do so by offering something.  You can get even more leverage from your offerings by making them bigger, but only winnable via a lottery or drawing.  The sky is the limit with your campaigns.  Get creative and think like a marketer.

So while Social Media presents a very affordable marketing platform for businesses, you cannot avoid putting some effort into them.  There is nothing cruise control about this platform.  You must work it to make sure you have an ever-growing audience and your campaigns are accomplishing your sales & marketing goals.

Investing in Pay-Per-Click (PPC) even with a constrained budget

With today’s economy, business are always looking for ways to “save” on expenses.  That makes perfect sense when there is limited GDP growth, competition is fierce and margins are constantly under attack.  Many times, this method is over-applied to areas of your income statement that are revenue generators.  It is important not to confuse accounting and business operations.  From an accounting stand-point, Marketing is an expense.  From a business operations stand-point, Marketing should be viewed as a revenue-generating, return-producing INVESTMENT.  Any Marketing that is not achieving those goals, should be closely scrutinized because when Marketing solutions are done properly, they will produce revenue and they will generate a positive Return on Investment (ROI).

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is one of the most direct forms of Marketing that, when implemented properly, will produce an ROI.  Even when your budget is limited or even anemic, there are ways to implement PPC so that it will achieve your financial objectives.

The first step in beginning any PPC campaign is figuring out what budget you have to work with.  Once you have figured out that number, there are some key decisions that will need to be made to ensure your PPC campaign produces the results you are seeking.

The first thing you should evaluate is the profitability of your products and services.  This involves a combination of two things…. The gross margin each product/service produces and the volume of that product/service you are operationally setup to handle.  So for example, you may make a very large gross margin on selling Tankless Hot Water Heaters, but you may only be setup to install one of those every 2 days due to the qualifications and availability of your installation crew.  Look at both and isolate the highest profit producing products/services that you can also support in volume and you are off to a great start.

The second thing you should look at is the geographic parameters of where you obtain your most profitable customers.  You may serve the entire Metropolitan area, but you may also make the lions-share of your profit from 3 zip codes.  In looking at this time and time again, the 80/20 rule seems to almost always prove out here…. 80% of the profit comes from 20% of the servable market.  Identify your most profitable geography and focus on generating more business from them.

Now that you have these elements in place, you can make some decisions.  With a constrained budget, you also want to constrain the scope of your PPC campaign.  You do that by focusing on the most profitable products/services and also the most profitable geography.  The goal here is to keep the scope of the campaign consistent with the size of the budget.  To borrow a fishing analogy, we are using our best bait to fish in the smallest pond that is stocked with the maximum amount of the most desirable fish.

In closing, remember that most businesses start out their PPC investments with a small budget and then grow them over time.  PPC works when implemented methodically and strategically and the results are measured and monitored.

Online Reputation Matters!

Like it or not, your business’ online reputation matters.  You could be the best company that offers your products or services, but if online information it readily available that paints a different picture, it will negatively impact your reputation and ultimately your sales. 

Nearly seventy percent of customers admit that they check out reviews online before committing to a purchase. So it’s up to you to manage your online reputation. People are checking out Yelp, Angie’s List, Google, Yahoo Local Listings (and hundreds others) for information. From time to time, you will get a negative review.  In our culture, it is inevitable because you just cannot please everyone.  Knowing this, there are a two key steps to take:

1)    Be Proactive:  Don’t wait to generate your online reputation only after a negative review has been posted.  Have a routine part of your operation that encourages happy customers to post positive reviews about your business.  Most will not take the time to do so, so the key word in that prior sentence is “routine”.  You have to ask all happy customers to do it, knowing that only a select few will invest the time to do so.  It is OK to encourage them to write these reviews with some type of offer such as a $5 gift card or an entry into a raffle for a larger ticket giveaway.  The cool thing about these reviews, is that once they have been written, they are assets for your business that are permanent.  So there is tremendous value in a positive online review.  A volume of positive reviews takes the punch out of the rare negative review.

2)      Be Reactive:  When a negative review is written about you, respond… EVERY time.  An occasional negative review will actually make your profile look more legitimate.  So, take the time to get your side of the situation documented as a response to that negative review.  Your goal here is to be non-emotional, fact-based and ultimately to try to make lemonade out of lemons.  Rarely will you be able to change the mind of someone who has written a negative review, but you can write your response in a way that anyone who takes the time to read it, will see your side of the situation and feel that you handled it professionally.  That can, sometimes, carry more weight than a positive review because we all know things go wrong in life.  You want to portray that when things do go wrong, you make things right for that customer.  If you do succeed in turning around the opinion of the reviewer, as them to take the time to post another review conveying how you resolved their situation and turned things around.

Things to remember when building your website

By Scott Martin

Building a website can sometimes be a daunting task, especially for a business owner who doesn’t know what critical elements are required.  Many times, all the attention is spent on the aesthetics of the site and not enough attention is paid to some of the most important elements that are going to ensure the site maximizes its visibility on the Internet.  Below is a brief list of some of those strategically important elements:

1.    Keyword-Rich Copy:  Make sure that the most commonly searched keywords for your business are built into the framework of the site.  This should include having a dedicated page (i.e. Profit Center Page) for each of these major keywords as well as ensuring the body-copy language used through each profit center page is written richly with those keywords and correlating keyword in mind.

2.    Responsive Design:  Make sure that the site is built with Responsive Design technology.   This is the most current technology that facilitates making sure your website functions, loads and looks proper on all hardware devices (Desktops, Laptops, Tablets AND Smartphones).  Over 50% of searches originate from a mobile device these days and this technology makes sure that the user has a positive experience and doesn’t “bounce” off the site.  Additionally, this is the preferred technology and configuration to Google, so it is your best option for delivering a great search and browsing experience to your prospective and current customers.

3.    Proper Admin Architecture:  Make sure to have 4 necessary ingredients embedded into the architecture of your site:

a.    XML Sitemap

b.    Diclaimer Page

c.    Privacy Policy Page

d.    Robots.txt file (and make sure once the site is launched that this file is updated so that Search Engines are unblocked so they can crawl and index the new site)

4.    Analytics:  Add Google Analytics to your site so you can track any and all behaviors on the site and use the information to make decisions.  This is the only scientific way you will be able to properly track the performance of the new site.

5.    User Experience:  Look at the site wearing the hat of a prospective client and see what their experience is like.  You want their experience to be intuitive and you want to make it VERY easy to become a “lead” for one of your sales people.  Therefore, having lead-gen forms, call to action and phone numbers in lots of strategic places is important.

6.    Marketing:  Make sure you site is properly positioning your brand, your products and your services in a compelling and persuasive fashion.  You have to look at the site as a marketer and make sure that you are sufficiently highlighting the features and benefits of your products as well as why someone should choose you rather than your competition.  This needs to be done in a very creative way because users will not typically read lengthy copy to garner this information.  One of the most effective ways to do this is to embed video into your site that tells the story you want customers and prospective customers to have about you.

7.    SEO Compliance:  Make sure the site is fully Search Engine Optimization (SEO) compliant.  All Meta data should be written within the constraints of Search Engines and should be very keyword-rich. Each page, should have unique Title Metatags that delineate the contents of just that page (similar to a chapter title within a book).  All images should be ALT tagged properly with a keyword-rich description of the image.  There are many third-party tools that will grade the SEO Compliance of your site.  One such tool from a recognized third party can be found at https://marketing.grader.com/

While there are many more considerations that go into the construction of a site, this list encapsulates some of the most commonly neglected items and can be used as a reference for making sure your new site it a step ahead of the norm.