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The 5 pillars of online marketing for a small business

If you own a small business you know how important is marketing but you are overwhelmed by a lot of unknown terms used by marketers, terms you don’t know a lot about.

Therefore you are confused. Let’s describe what the 5 pillars are for small business online marketing.

 

• Local Marketing

If it is true that customers search products online, it is also true they search mainly locally. If I want to buy something and I live in Phoenix, AZ, I don’t care about the perfect store in New York.  If I can buy that product online I can look at the store in NY but if I need something locally, I do not. If you are a small business, you must be visible locally more than internationally which means that if a customer searches for your company he must be able to find all the important information about you and if a customer searches for a product/service, he must be able to also find your company. Local marketing means a lot of different things like local listings, website content, advertising campaigns set up, social media accounts content and so on.

• SEO

This magic word is related to search engines. Search Engine Optimization is the process of being able to be ranked better by search engines. But how does a  search engine generally works?

The process is simple: the search engine scans your website, keeps track of the words used and of all the combination of words and phrase and then stores it  in a database. When someone starts a new search, it compares the terms of the search with all the website profiles in the database and order the result based on the most relevant.

Therefore your content on the website, your keywords, your website description, your domain must all be relevant to what users search.

It is important to think like a customer, not as a business, not as a marketer.
Customers don’t know deeply your business but they could need your product/service. They do searches using incorrect terms (or combination of terms) but you have to create content that shall be able to be relevant to the searches done by users. Don’t write content for yourself (especially if you have to use technical terms) but for the customers. Don’t use keywords that you can use daily and customers don’t.

• Content Marketing

You have created your website: awesome!

Most small businesses when they publish their website, think the job is done. Actually, the job starts now.

You don’t read a book over and over (unless it is masterpiece) because you know the content, the story. Same for a website: If you never change anything, it becomes boring both for customers and for search engines (they don’t update your profile because there are no changes).

Content marketing is all about using the content to be more visible and searchable, to be more attractive to potential customers, and to be more useful to them.

If your website is very attractive to users, your product will be as well.  This is even truer for small businesses where the lack of brand and fame must be replaced by a deep knowledge of the product/service you provide. You have that knowledge, I am sure, but you need to convince the customers that you have it.

• Reputation Management

Now you are online. Internet is the free digital space. Anyone can say anything, most the time, without any control. And this is the time of reality shows where anyone want become famous. People like to be an Internet lead actor. Review sites give the possibility to people to have a power, the power to judge others.

You need to take care of that, your reputation online is very important.

It is common sense that a user trusts more another users than a business owner. Therefore you need to check the entire user generated content about you, you need to answer if it is the case, and you need to be able to interact with your customers.

• Social media marketing

Why is this so important lately?

Because customers are using it and any media where there are customers is important media for small businesses. There is something more.

Social networks differently from other media (like television or magazines) are places where the content is generated mostly by users, where users engage in personal relationships with other users, where the communication is bi-directional, where the emotions are more important than the features.

Social media is the perfect place to engage potential customers, but it is important for small businesses to act like a user, not like a business. Act as a person not as a business, because this is the only way to be effective.

Are you a restaurant owner? If yes you already know that marketing is key element for your success.

A lot of restaurant businesses unfortunately fail the first year and many of them because of lack of marketing.

When you open a new restaurant, a lot of customers want to taste your food and try your new concept. Usually you have also allocated a budget for the initial launch, and you are sure over the time your high quality service and food will be enough for your success.

After the first period, problems start to arise. People are not coming back and new people coming in less than before. This is the moment where only if you planned a good marketing strategy can you survive and become profitable. Don’t think that restaurant success is based only on quality of food and service.

Eating is a need. Eating out is not, but it could be. Therefore we need to understand why someone wants to go to a restaurant and why to yours.

We all know that customers are critical to your success. Well, let’s analyze them.

 

NEW CUSTOMERS

Let’s start from a new customer perspective

• He finds you and then decides to come to you for one or more of the following reasons:
  • Location: because he lives/works close to your location  –> Local Marketing
  • Food proposition: because you have something special (food, service, atmosphere, layout…) –>  Marketing proposition
• He heard about you
  • Referral: because someone else recommended your place –> Reputation

If he found you, it means he searched for a restaurant, therefore

• Be visible so they can find you à SEO & Content
  • Be attractive so he can be interested in you –>  Website

If he heard about you, he probably will check your business

• Be attractive so he can confirm his interest –> Website
• Be consistent so he can have a confirmation about the referral–>  Reputation

1st TIP: LOCAL MARKETING You need to check where your business is listed ·        Check that all your information are consistent ·        Check that there are not any repetitions ·        Check that all the information is correct and complete

2nd TIP: MARKETING POSITIONING You need to make clear in all your communications what makes you unique ·        Create a clear claim ·        Focus your website and your printing on what makes you unique ·        Use Public relations to share your uniqueness to the local community ·        Create a visual marketing campaign (logo, corporate kit, printing material) that is consistent with your message

3rd TIP: WEBSITE Don’t limit your Website to your “menu” online ·        Give the option for customers to interact with you (newsletter, blog, order online…) ·        Share your knowledge without unveiling your secrets ·        Focus on content: give customers a reason to visit your Website more often and come back to your restaurant

4th TIP: REPUTATION Customers love to review a restaurant where they have been especially if it has been either  an amazing or an awful experience ·        Monitor any review you find online ·        Respond to the bad reviews ·        In order to give customers all the information they need, publish the reviews on your Website ·        Ask your customers to review your restaurant

RETURNING CUSTOMERS

At the end of their experience at your restaurant, a customer can be:

• Unsatisfied: something went wrong. It could be also that the level of expectations he had was too high for what his experience was. Obviously if he doesn’t want to come back, you need to do something to recover this customer –> Social Media
• Satisfied: he has been satisfied but not enough to consider that experience as unique or special. The main reason why a satisfied customer doesn’t come back is that he forgets about you. With a lot of restaurant on the market it is easy to be attracted by something else –> Customer Interaction Management
• Delighted: he is enthusiastic about the experience. This customer will come back for sure but pay attention that now the level to expectation is very high and he can disappointed very easily –> Social Media

5th TIP: SOCIAL MEDIA Why is Facebook, Twitter and Instagram so important? ·        Social media is the only way to keep in touch with customers continuously ·        You need to update them very often ·        Don’t post only promotional info: tell stories, involve customers ·        Social media is also the best channel to transmit emotions to customers: images, sounds. These are elements that cannot be transmitted through Web only ·        Social media is perfect to ease the interactions among the customers

6th TIP: Customer Interaction Management Interaction with a customer is the perfect way to keep him interested ·        Newsletters: try to contact your customers regularly updating them about new offer, promotions ·        Printing material: update regularly your marketing material to keep high the level of interest ·        Blog: talk to customers continuously through your content, establish a dialogue and make them know you are there waiting for them

Fabrizio Cali
Small Business Manager
Advertising Business Consultants

 

It is clear that digital marketing is important. Any business knows that.

Almost any business have a website, most of them have a blog and some of them do online advertising but many of them are losing a lot of opportunities.

Which is the big difference between offline and online marketing?

The biggest is that digital marketing can and must be updated, managed and it must be interesting.

A lot of business owners think that developing and publishing a website means the end of a marketing action, actually it is the start.

Any activity in digital marketing needs continuous update and maintenance to be effective:

 

• Website: you receive a new brochure. At first glance it could be interesting and you are thinking to contact the company. Maybe you look at it 2-3 times to understand better. But after the 4^th time you are not interested anymore. Why? Because the content is still the same and there is nothing interesting anymore. You cannot afford to do a new brochure every month, but you can update your Website (your digital brochure) to attract users and keep them interested.
• Advertising campaign: differently from a traditional media campaign which is usually prepared and launched and cannot be modified, in the digital space a campaign can be modified in any moment (and that is the main advantage). You can lower the cost per user or increase the leads rate or even change target if you see that something is going wrong. Most of the time companies set up a campaign (keywords and budget) and they forget about it
• SEO: this “magic” word is all about the performance of your website on search engine ranking. I don’t want to be tedious describing in details how a search engine works but a thing must be underlined: a search engine doesn’t catalog websites, it tries to understand them. A search engine evolves continuously because rankings are like a race: you are running and you are in the second position, silver medal coming! But if you continue to run at the same speed ignoring whatever happens around you, probably somebody will reach and surpass you, farewell silver medal! You need to monitor the others, you need to modify your run every day.
• Social media: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so on, are all social media networks. Let’s analyze what it means. First of all they are media. This is clear, they broadcast information. But they are networks which means they are able to connect different “persons”. Most important they are social. Also a TV network can be defined a media network (this is actually the proper name) but it is not social. Social means that the information is flowing in both directions. Without the social component, it becomes a traditional media. A business if present in social media networks, must act and react and must dialogue and participate. Otherwise it is only like a website and nobody cares about a website on a social media network

What I am telling so far is that “doing” digital marketing is easy: everyone can create a stunning website, set up an advertising campaign, and optimize content and SEO and open infinite social media accounts.

What is hard is to manage all this: it means time, dedication, knowledge. A lot of skills that most of the small businesses don’t have (and most of the marketers neither to be honest). And this is the reason most of them fail on digital marketing.

Everyone wants marketing. Everyone wants the best marketing consultant. Everyone wants to spend close to nothing.

Now please you stop dreaming and let’s go to understand how you can “understand” if your marketing consultant is right for you.

Somebody can now say: it is simple, if he brings results he is good otherwise not. But you have results only after he started to work (and being paid) and sometime results is not the perfect parameter to consider.

There is a big issue that any marketing consultant should manage first: he doesn’t know your business.

You are the “king” of your business, you know market, customers, business model, goals, needs. He knows nothing about that.

So here are the rules to follow to understand if that marketing consultant really cares about your results:

1) First questions he does are about your business

If he starts talking about the past results he did with other customers, I would try to understand if he applies standard model to any customer. In this case sometime he is lucky, sometime not. In your case maybe he will not be lucky

2) He spends time with you to understand what you want really

It is not true that any company wants to grow:it is different for each company how they want and they can grow. A good marketing consultant helps you to go where you want to go, not where he thinks he is right to go

3) He explains you the “why”

He knows nothing about your business but probably you know little about digital marketing. The difference here is that you are paying him. So it is important that he is able to share with you the reasons why he is planning to do something. It is a way to make you able to review him

4) He admits mistakes

Everyone does mistakes. Then there are people that find a culprit for everything. But they never learn from their mistakes. Others they know they can do mistakes. In this case they learn from the, they know how to repair what they did wrong.

What is it a community? It is a group of person sharing the same interests and living desires. A business community is all around a company but it works in the same way.

A community is a multiplier of needs and solutions. In fact a man alone is weaker than a community. We face that every day, even in our neighbor communities. A business community is a powerful instrument both for your external clients both for your internal clients (the employees). It is the first step to transform your company into a community able to share information, put in common stories and business practice and create a two-way communication channel with all the persons that surround you

Local marketing is not a localized version of global marketing. It is another approach http://advertisingbusinessconsultants.com/local.html #local #marketing 

Everyone speaks about content marketing, but are you ready for this?

1. Context

Content must be related to what you do but it doesn’t speak only of what you do. In sales do you do free promotions? I guess so. Same you should do for content: you give free content (useful ones) to potential customers to attract them

There is nothing worse for an user to search for something, to think finally he found it, click the link and understand after 5 seconds that the content is completely useless for him. 

2. Customization

Content must be customized for different users especially if you have a broad range of products and services. Make possible for users to find immediately what they are looking for, create different landing pages, interact with users when they come to your website

3. Update

You have a blog: awesome… not really. You need to update it continuously. It is an hard work but it must be done. You don’t want your showroom empty and outdated for sure. Customers think about a content not updated that you don’t care about yourself and probably neither about them

4. Interaction

If you talk to someone, he could answer: this is a general rule. And he can say good things or even bad. You need to interact with your audience. It makes you more human and more reliable. If you think that nobody can talk about you forget the content marketing

5. No overselling

A content marketing strategy is different from a sales strategy. You cannot speak only about yourself and your product. Customers come to you to have more information than simply your products/services. Readers want stories more than numbers.

. 

We are at the end of 2014.

Therefore it is a good moment to do predictions about what will be the major marketing trends in 2015 

As any other prediction (especially speaking about marketing) they will be wrong probably but it is worth a try.

1) Content marketing

Content is already a key factor in marketing and it will continue to be even more in 2015. Consumers are attracted by content and engaged by personalized content  There will be a huge effort by companies to empower their content marketing trying also to add a high level of customization

2) Visual marketing

Content is not only text. Nowadays an image speaks more than a text. So far visual marketing has been considered something connected to corporate image but now businesses must be able to communicate also through images. Pinterest and Instagram already showed their role in marketing in 2014 and there will be more next year.

3) Mobile

If it was true in the past that everyone had a PC, now it is definitely true that everyone has a mobile phone (and most of them a smartphone). And everyone is using more and more it as unique access to Internet. Companies will need mobile content. It doesn’t mean the “mobile” version of the Web content, it means something different because accessing content through mobile is a completely different experience

4) Customer emotions management

CRM (Customer relationship management) changed a lot in the last year. Support doesn’t mean anymore simply helping current and potential customers, it is really a sales force. But the approach will be more and more customized and a big role will be the management of customer’s emotions. As everyone knows emotions have the primary role in the purchasing process

Let’s update at the end of 2015 to see if at least one of the prediction will be right.

And if not? We are marketers we are used to change opinions