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.
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
Tuesday, August 5, 2014
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.
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
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.
Friday, June 20, 2014
Things to remember when building your website
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.
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