Top 5 Mistakes Businesses Make When Advertising Online

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advertising looks just like everyone else, you're just .... Let me give you an example: The name of my business is J. Be
Why Most Small Business Marketing Fails And What To Do About It! Offered By J. Bergman Consulting 800-305-7598

Most small business marketing fails today because the owner hasn’t identified what sets them apart from their competition. I like to think of it as finding your sweet spot like when you’re playing golf or tennis. You know how it feels when you hit the ball perfectly and it goes exactly where you intended it to? Well that’s your sweet spot and it feels really good. In business when you are able to identify what sets you apart from your competition and get your phone to ring, that’s your sweet spot. When you can clearly tell your prospective customers why they should do business with you instead of your competition, you’ll be in your sweet spot. Unfortunately most business owners don’t give this a lot of thought and just advertise hoping for the best. That’s like rolling the dice and hoping they fall the way you want them to. If your advertising looks just like everyone else, you’re just hoping they click on your add or dial your phone number. The other problem with small business marketing is that it typically only focuses on one area and lacks a complete marketing foundation. A marketing foundation is like a three legged stool. It means that your marketing needs to be balanced. If it isn’t, it will fail or be minimally successful. Many business owners spend a lot of time and money trying to create an on-line presence at the exclusion of the business that’s right in front of their eyes. They invest a lot of time and money on SEO and trying to get on the first page of Google and overlook the obvious. Having an on-line presence is important, but it’s just one leg of a balanced marketing foundation. Being on the first page of Google is important, but don’t put the cart before the horse.

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Marketing Leg 1: Current and Past Customers The first leg of your marketing system should be with your current and past customers. After all, these people already know you and trust you. If you spend time developing a system to continue to build and nurture your relationship with them, you can continue to market to them and get repeat business. This can be done in several ways, but the best way is to set up an email system that allows you to send them information, specials or discounts that you may offer from time to time. You can also send a monthly newsletter with good information that your customers would be glad to receive and read. There are many ways to do this. There are newsletters available for almost all business categories. Most businesses have a data base of their past clients. If you don’t, you should begin right away to develop one. This should be the first leg of any balanced marketing system. By strengthening your relationship with your current and past clients you are well on your way to the second leg of your marketing foundation. You should get email addresses from all new customers that you do business with. By assuring them that you won’t send them spam or give their email to anyone else, but will only use it to inform them of specials or discounts, you should be able to get email addresses from most of your new customers. If you have a website, you should have a way of collecting email addresses by offering something of value in exchange for their name and email address. After all, that’s how you got this special report. Most small business websites that I look do not have a method of collecting names and email addresses. This is a mistake. pg. 3

Marketing Leg 2: Referrals and Reviews The second leg of your marketing foundation is having a system to get referrals from your customers. If your customers are happy with your products or services, they will more than likely refer you to their friends. Most people don’t automatically think of this so you have to ask. You can encourage them by establishing a referral system that offers a discount or some other reward. If you have a website that is listed on Google Places, you should encourage your customers to write a review. This is another type of referral that works well. When a customer does find you on the internet, the reviews serve as a recommendation. If you’re not listed on Google places, you should make sure you get listed on Google, Yahoo, Bing and several local directories that are free and can help bring new business to you. These first two legs of your marketing foundation are the most overlooked by business owners and yet they can deliver a steady flow of new business. If you don’t have these first two legs covered, you should begin right now to put them into your marketing system. You’ll be surprised and delighted with the results you’ll get by including these first to legs of a balanced marketing foundation. Marketing Leg 3: Internet Marketing Marketing on the internet is important for any business today, but it isn’t the Holy Grail. There are so many people pushing SEO and first page of Google that business owners are overwhelmed by all the hype. The problem is that many of the people pushing those services have good technical skills, but poor marketing skills. That’s evident when you look at the results that most businesses get from these tactics.

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Having a website is important! Unfortunately, many build the wrong website, send the wrong message, and fail to attract customers. This report will point out the Fatal Mistakes that businesses make with their website. Fatal Mistake 1: Picking the Wrong Domain Name When you start out with the wrong domain name, you’re starting out wrong from the beginning. Most business owners want their domain name to be the name of their business. While that seems logical, it isn’t. Unless someone is looking for your business by name, your website won’t be found. That means the only people who will find your website are those that already know you, not new customers. Let me give you an example: The name of my business is J. Bergman Consulting. My domain name is businesscoachsandiego.com. Unless you were looking for my business in particular, you would not have found me on the internet unless you searched for J. Bergman Consulting. On the other hand, searching for a business coach in San Diego, you would have found me. Your domain name should be what you do, not who you are. Does that make sense? It does because it works. Fatal Mistake 2: Information Overload "Less is more". You've heard that saying and it holds true when delivering your message online. The average company website tries to put everything possible on the home page, hoping to attract more new customers. The sad fact is that cramming all this onto one page simply makes any useful information on the page hard to find. If you focus on your company instead of pg. 5

what problems you can solve for customers, you dilute your message to the viewer. Web sites with too much information frustrate customers who are looking for quick access to a product or service, not an education in the company’s market or their history. Visitors to your web site scan pages rather than study them. Studies show that readers can’t, or won’t, read large blocks of text. In fact, many people will only scan highlights and bullet points. Your pages should have plenty of white space to make your important points stand out, and your message must be simple, compelling, and easy to read. A web page with simple layout, clean graphics, bold headline, few bullets and with a clear call to action is much more effective than a cluttered page. But what if you have a lot of products or services to promote? Don’t try to put the entire store on one page. Create a page for each product or service, with information specific to the problem that product or service corrects. Focus just on a single service and your messages will be shorter, more focused and more useful to the person searching for that service. ‘Optimizing’ each page for a specific search helps it turn up in search results, and each page acts as its own on-line ad, drawing customers interested in that specific product. Your goal should be to have a clean website that is easy to navigate with good quality content that pertains to what people are searching for. If you follow that concept, Google will reward you by ranking you higher. Most keyword choices business owner make for their website are dead wrong! Many business owners either aren’t aware of keywords, or they ignore keywords and search- ability when they create their pages. Business owners think they need to advertise who they are instead of what they pg. 6

do. The fact is most local customers are searching for what you do and that should be the focus of your keywords. When people DO use keywords, they often select the broadest terms imaginable, in hopes of getting more traffic to their web site. The opposite is true; picking keywords that are too broad means facing unbeatable competition and guarantees the page will be hard to find. Are you being found when customers are ready to buy? Who is the more motivated buyer? The one who is browsing for ‘fencing contractor’ (with 70 million competing web sites), or ‘fix my broken gate in ’? The first is doing broad research, maybe thinking about a project down the road, but the second has an immediate, specific need and their credit card is in their hand. Which customer do you want to attract?

Fatal Mistake 3: Making Your Website Your Only Form of Online Marketing Are you neglecting additional online advertising opportunities with classifieds and business listings? Most people think the only road to internet success is the company web site being on page 1 of Google’s search results. Unfortunately, most business will never reach

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page one with their company web site for any search term. That is understandable, though. SEO – the science of ‘Search Engine Optimization’ – is hard, takes specialized knowledge, and can be slow to take effect. Don’t be discouraged - there are alternatives that make your business findable in multiple places when local customers are looking for your product or service. These can include business listings and free on-line classifieds like Craigslist and BackPage. These types of listings are constantly monitored by search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo and can appear when consumers are searching online and ready to buy. This means you can be found online – even if you do not have a company web site! Fatal Mistake 4: Not creating a communication channel with prospects Once you DO get people to your site, you have a chance to sell to them, but they may not buy the first time. That doesn’t mean they WON’T buy, just that this is not the right offer or the right time. They may respond to a future offer. But how do you get that future offer to them? Smart businesses create lists of potential customers and contact information, and they stay in contact with those potential customers. Creating your list is simple – in exchange for their email address or cell phone number, you can offer a free report or ‘instant % off’ coupons. Place the sign-up box prominently on each web page and watch your list grow. Automated services make this easy to do. pg. 8

When new customers sign up, they verify their interest in your offers and receive your offer in return. The reports can be a simple advice - a list of steps to take to prevent your pipes from freezing in the winter, preparing your car for summer vacation or springtime lawn-care tips. As your list of your customers grows, provide them with regular mailings with helpful information, not just sales offers. Take time to build a relationship with your customers. When they are ready to buy or know someone that is looking for what you provide they will think of you. Rising ‘Mobile Phone’ usage is making text marketing campaigns more attractive every day. Very affordable SMS text services allow you to send your customers discount coupons. The systems work the same as e-mail collection, but they opt-in on their phones. Your SMS text messages are delivered directly to these phones and they can be timed for maximum impact. If you are a traditional advertiser, you plan your promotions weeks ahead of time. You design, print, mail your ads, and then hope the ad gets saved for future use. Imagine being the restaurant that mails a discount coupons to a customer’s phone at 4:55, right when they are deciding where to go for dinner. Or, maybe you need a few extra appointments to fill a slow day – send a ‘Today Only!’ offer to your repeat customers. SMS messaging services are effective and reasonably priced. Your focused ads cost about a nickel each and are only sent to people who are already interested in your business.

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Fatal Mistake 5: Making It Difficult For Customers to Contact You What is it that customers are looking for when they search you out? They want to know that what you do is what they need. Next, they may want to know you are open or where you are located, and they definitely want your phone number. This information has to be on your main page and it has to be prominent. When your customer has a broken water pipe, they don’t want to search for hidden contact information. What they want to see is, ‘We Fix Broken Pipes’, ‘On Call Now’, and a big, bold phone number.

Fatal Mistake 6: Not taking advantage of online viral referral opportunities ‘Social Media’, like FaceBook, LinkedIn or YouTube, offers definite opportunities for your business. The social sites encourage your friends and customers to advertise your business for you. The very basis of social sites is sharing of interesting content, and some of that shared content could be yours. There are over 200 million internet users in the U.S., and 71% of those users have FaceBook accounts. Half of those, or over 75 million people in the U.S., check into FaceBook on any given day. pg. 10

Every time a customer comments on, ‘likes’ or shares your page, the fact is posted to an average of 130 friends. Plug-ins and code allow you to put ‘bookmark’, ‘share’ and ’like’ buttons on your web site. This makes it easy for visitors to ‘like’ your page. Every ‘like’ a page gets is a vote of confidence that helps boost your sites rankings while showing it to users’ friends. YouTube, now owned by Google, is understandably search-engine friendly. It has become the #2 search engine – right behind Google. “More video is uploaded to YouTube in one month than the 3 major US networks created in 60 years” - YouTube. Video production is now a desk-top enterprise, and anyone can make movies and put them on YouTube for free. You can use this powerful medium to advertise your business by making simple ‘how-to’ videos that show your customers how to do basic tasks. YouTube also makes it easy for others to share your videos. Use keywords that describe the video, and include links to your web site, both in the video and in the description of the video. This way, when someone shares the video, you still get the link back to your web site. Building A Strong Marketing Foundation Is Within Your Reach Effective marketing is much more than SEO and first page on Google. There are so many pieces to the marketing puzzle that is isn’t a “Do It Yourself” program, but requires a balanced approach to cover all the bases. I hope this report has given you some ideas you’ll start using today. I would be honored to help you begin to build your 3 legged marketing foundation pg. 11

today. Call me at 619-993-1771 or email me at [email protected] This Marketing Report is brought to you by: John Bergman J. Bergman Consulting 113 West G. St., Suite 301 San Diego, CA 92101 619-993-1771 www.businesscoachsandiego.com If you have any questions about how to implement the strategies that you read about in this short report or if you would like speak more about how to get more customers by making your business findable online please do not hesitate to contact me.

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