What Next For Your New Website

Earlier this week I had a few things come up that made me think about some of the failures of small businesses after they receive a new website or start a new social media presence on Facebook or Twitter. I got sidetracked and could not write the post but a very timely post by Mark Fulton at DotSauce.com fit nicely with my thoughts as well. The post also reminded me of my post I did awhile back concerning offline marketing tips for promoting a website.

When presenting to small businesses we online marketers tend to focus on talking about driving traffic through SEO, PPC, Social Media, and other methods that drive targeted web traffic to the customers, hopefully, quality domain name.

Although businesses like Amazon.com can focus the majority of their marketing online local businesses have different needs and in many cases a good portion of the traffic to their website will come from offline marketing methods.

Many of these local businesses are new to promoting on the web and have a perception that they need not do anything to promote their website once it has been turned over to them. I cannot tell you how many times I have witnessed customers pay real money for a new website but visit the business month after month and never see their domain name on their business cards, menus, t-shirts, or billboards.

What a missed opportunity. Most consumers will NOT remember a phone number or address. A phone number is really 10 words, a website can be as short as one word. Which are you going to have a better chance of remembering?

It is important that small business owners remember that, yes their web development partner should make sure their site is properly optimized for the search engines, but unless they are paying a marketing company to handle all their marketing promotions, that they treat their domain name as they previously treated their phone number or address. They can provide more information on that domain name than they could possibly provide on a business card or an ad in a newspaper or billboard. Use those methods to drive people to your prime real estate on the web, your website.

We at LocalTek make it a point to help our customers understand holistic marketing and making sure customers promote. As much as we do our best to help our customers it is typically less than a 50 percent ratio that take advantage of the FREE ways to promote their website in the places they are already paying for.

With more people using mobile phones and search everyday it is important to keep your online brand in front of them, let them search for your website and cut your competitors off at the pass. Your online marketing does not stop once the website is handed over, no matter what web development company you are working with, the ability to attract customers only starts with the website hand off. Making sure your website continues to work for you is part of a holistic marketing approach that continues like any other marketing that you may be doing.

Small Business vs. Corporate Sales Approach

A little over a year ago I quit my what could only be described as a corporate sales job in the telecommunications and mobile space and entered the world of marketing and selling to local businesses in rural Missouri.

In the beginning I was a little concerned about being able to translate the approaches that I had used in the past to generating new business and putting together proposals that were valuable for my customers.

There are many differences that you have to keep in mind when dealing with small businesses as compared to dealing with large or medium sized companies, here are 5 that I have found very useful to keep in mind when my sales team or myself is planning on meeting with a local business:

• Let's start with an obvious one, in most cases you will be dealing directly with the owner meaning if this person is spending money it is coming directly from their own pocket. This causes a completely different mentality than someone spending someone else's money like in a corporate environment.
• Education is key but do not overwhelm, unlike in corporate business environments where there are typically teams of people to work on individual projects or even people dedicated to just one specific topic in a small business people are much less specialized and resources are much tighter. Keep your "pitch" on topic and show the value points. Examples of how it relates to their business is key to making the point fast.
• Expect to be more flexible with appointment times even when the customer is interested. One of the things that I had the hardest time with when first moving into the small business sales world was the fact that things were not as structured when it came to meetings and appointments. Even with your best clients things can get busy and they have to cancel at the last minute. Be respectful that they are running a business and do not have a large team to do so.
• Do not be a salesman. Everyone is trying to sell something to them everyday. If you are coming into to their business and are trying to be the slick sales guy in a suit, their automatic "no" response will prevail. If you are trying to be a local person and dealing with the local community, let your personality and friendship with these potential customers be one of the selling factors in your product.
• One major difference I found between the corporate sales world and the local business world is that you cannot expect the customer to make themselves available for you after hours. In my past life much time was spent on customer calls at all hours of the night, it was expected that employees on both sides put the hours in to get projects engineered and sold. Local businesses have a different focus and have more structured business hours. Many have no interest in the "wine and dine" of the corporate world and would prefer that time with their family. Make sure you factor this in when you are pushing for time on their schedule.

For those of you that may be making the leap from selling to large businesses as compared to the core of American business, which is the small business, some of the above items may help when you think about your approach.

Want Free Small Business Promotion?

Spending time with local small business owners over the past couple years there is one theme that is constant no matter what type of business. How do I get the most bang for my buck?

Most of the businesses want to find away to start working online and promoting awareness of their brand online but typically do not have the time or the ability to change their marketing spending on the fly as it is planned out in advance.

This means that when working with them it is very important to help find cost effective ways for them to promote themselves, sometimes in ways that may not be obvious in the beginning but once recognized are easy to implement and take advantage of. Many of these companies have been working with legacy marketing companies for years who do a great job with creatives, brochures, and overall design but may not have worked in making sure they do the same level of branding online.

It is important as a small business starts making the move to taking advantage of the growth in local search to make sure they brand themselves and not someone else each step of the way. What do I mean by this? Consider this example of a way for any business that has a website to easily keep their business name in front of people they are communicating with daily.

Everyday I get emails from various types of businesses: customers, partners, competitors, etc. They may be the most professional, perfectly written emails with great logos, maybe even a really nicely designed brochure attached that was done by a marketing firm paid thousands of dollars, but then you see this:

Jane Doe

Business XYZ

jane@hotmail.com

It may not be obvious but there is a major issue here, especially if the company is paying people to help promote their company or working on branding campaigns. Business XYZ , in this case, is promoting Hotmail, not themselves. There is a very simple solution to this.

Use your website name as your email address as well, in other words use jane@businessxyz.com instead of the hotmail address. Although not every business has a website the cost of a domain name and email at most places these days is a very small percentage of the cost of advertising in most mediums these days. Why not take advantage of a free or low cost way to promote your business name?

These days setting up email and buying a domain name is almost as easy as setting up a free email account at most services. And if you are concerned about the technical nature there are more and more companies available to help local businesses with simple technology needs at reasonable costs compared to what companies may of charged in the past.

If you do have a website and the company that put it together for you did not offer the option to setup your own email make sure you talk to them, there is no reason you should not be offered email as part of your website package.

No longer can you look at your website as a technical, nice to have, item. It is an essential part of your marketing. Over 51 percent of searches are locally focused now (read this article at Frager Factor). This means people are not looking in the places they have in the past  like the Yellow pages. Make sure when you start your marketing online it is not just your website though, use every email as a chance to keep your website name in front of your partners and customers as well.

If you need help with understanding how to extend the marketing of your business online visit us at Localtek.com

Internet Marketing Seminar In Bonne Terre – Thanks Small Business Leaders!

Thanks to the small business owners from Bonne Terre, MO and surrounding communities for taking the time to come to our local search and online marketing seminar held at Mario's Italian Grill. I know that you are all extremely busy and taking 2 hours of your time after hours is asking a lot, especially when it is concerning a topic that is new to many and before the presentation was probably something you thought a business in rural Missouri may not need to be concerned with.

As you know now, it is very important to take advantage of all online avenues to create a holistic online marketing plan, from your Domain Name selection to your use of Facebook and Twitter, it all needs to work together to make sure you customers remember your brand and know where to go to find out what you are doing next, what specials you have or new products you are introducing. As I mentioned, finding targeted visitors for your website is key, understanding what customers are searching for when looking for a service or product you sell is how you focus on turning browsers into buyers. As I mentioned, no longer is having a website something you do simply because you can, now with the shift of newspaper readers and local business search moving online faster than ever you have to think about how your customers use the web even if you do not.

As I mentioned a portion of the content on this blog is targeted at helping my small business customers, as such I thought I would point out a few posts that I have done that you may find useful:

Why Small Business Should Advertise Online - Open Letter

Why Small Business Should Advertise During Down Times

Offline Ways To Promote Your Website

How To Create A Facebook Fan Page

Once again, thank you for my time and let me know how I can help!

An Open Letter To Small Business Owners – Help With Online Advertising

Dear Small Business Owner,

This letter is being written to help you understand the changes that are occurring that will have an effect on how you run your business and specifically on how you promote your business. The Internet is here to stay, historically small business has relied on legacy media such as newspapers and radio to promote their business as well as advertising only mediums such as billboards.  These media types focus on one thing and one thing only, eyeballs. The question you have to ask yourself now is this: Are their better ways to promote my business on the Internet? Is there something other than eyeballs I, as a business owner, need to think about?

You are likely very comfortable advertising with your local newspaper, Yellowpages, and radio station, the same salesperson has been visiting you for many years and you purchase month after month and they talk about the number of houses delivered too, the number of listeners, etc. Have they mentioned anything about the 92  percent of newspapers that have reported a drop in readership or the major drop in print Yellowpage usage?

Now, before you think that you have a business that is immune to the shift or that since you do not sell a product online that promoting your business on the Internet is not for you I would like to give you an example case where a business has grown their business by promoting online effectively.

This specific small business,  a 3 person pet grooming salon in rural Missouri, had never had a website because they had never thought that a pet grooming shop would need online promotion, the Yellowpages and Newspaper seemed the obvious place to advertise, everyone has been doing it for years, right????

After someone came into their shop to discuss a small website and targeted promotion on the web they decided that having a website might be "neat" but the company working with them also explained the concept of building the site to allow for targeted traffic that allows for higher customer conversions. This was a new concept to them, advertising had always been about viewers not necessarily only getting visitors that actually convert to customers.

The pet grooming shop decided to move forward and purchased both advertising and a website. The advertising was targeted by community and also very important was the targeting of the website that was developed for them. It was developed specifically to receive traffic for pet grooming customers in their specific rural town.

The results, after just one month of being live the customer contacted their supplier and let them know that they had several new customers that let them know they found them on the web. What does this mean? It means in even small towns people are searching for offline businesses instead  of going to the newspaper or flipping through the Yellowpages. This is a group of customers that you, the small business owner, is missing.

For many years small businesses have complained about corporate America ruining community businesses. The same thing has the potential to happen on the Internet. How can you tell? First off you have to ask yourself how you use the Internet or think about how your potential customers use the Internet. If the first thing that you thought after reading that was that this does not matter since you do not use the Internet, the thing you actually need to think about is the second part of the sentence, "think about how your customers use the Internet". One of the major mistakes many long time small business owners make is thinking that since they are not users that their customers are not.

Anyway, back to corporate America, they have had budgets to do marketing online for years, in many cases if you search for a certain type of business online in small and large towns the large corporate companies show up in the search results. Why? Because they know how to play the "Internet game". They understood that people are using the web for finding services and products locally. As a small business owner you need to think about this as well. The topic that seems so technical is actually your marketing today. No longer can you think about your website as a technical item but it needs to be looked at as a marketing tool. It is about finding customers not just having a website because it is "neat".

The next thought many small business owners will have is my town is too small no one is searching for services here. That is also not true and will be changing rapidly. The US government has approved a 7.2 billion stimulus package to drive broadband Internet access into rural America. This means the way people access and use the Internet in these areas will change drastically and if your business is not prepared those "corporate guys" will take business away because they show up in Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Being small and rural does not matter any more. Whether you are in New York City or Kearney, Nebraska the Internet is the Internet and people can find your competitors without having to drive to their doorstep.

So, if you have read this far I want to give you items to think about as you realize that maybe having a presence online that actually draws targeted viewers looking for your service or product is important:

• Targeted Traffic - Here is the best analogy to explain this: Shotgun Vs. Rifle. Think of newspapers and radio as the shotgun approach and targeted web traffic as a rifle. How you get that targeted traffic is the more complicated part. But it has been proven many times that targeted traffic converts at a much higher rate than traffic received from the shotgun approach
• Search Engine Optimization - SEO is the typical way this is said. SEO is the process of building your website in a way that draws the targeted visitors to your business presence online. Think about this, if the front door to your business is locked no one can get in. If your site is not optimized the front door might as well be locked.
• Domain Name Selection - This is VERY important, it is not as simple as just going to Godaddy.com and picking a name. It is important to select something that describes your business and if possible be rich in words that describe that you are doing. This helps gain the targeted traffic that is discussed above. In many cases it is worth the effort and money to acquire this domain name from a third party who may own the name currently. You selected your physical office location based on location, shouldn't you also choose the best possible location for your online presence?
• Call To Action - Once they get to your website you need to make sure they take action to contact or buy your product. Your site needs to be developed in a way that urges them to do this. This is most often the piece that is overlooked when developing a site (right up there with SEO).

After spending time with small business owners in both large and small towns and cities I have found it very common to hear the comment "My (insert family member here) is building my website." In almost all cases the site has been done in a way that is not optimized and will never have a visitor because the site was not used as a marketing tool but simply as an item that was "neat". It is important that you understand that your website is as important to your business presence as the sales people you have working with customers or the office space you have. It is your face to the public, but if no one ever sees it because it is hidden in a crowd and is never seen then it does not matter if it is "pretty and nice looking". You must optimize your web presence starting at the selection of your domain name and ending at the call to action to act once they get there.

For more information feel free to use the contact me button at the top of this page to get more details on what can be done to help your business prepare.

Thanks,

Bruce Marler