21 Feb 08 Search is Dead - Long Live Search
I recently read an article about Google’s new project Knol but when you go to knol.com, the site sells what looks like rug cleaners in German but from what I can tell the product is similar to wiki. Basically user generated content thats not moderated. While thats all good, I’m pondering the future of search.
As Google, starts to implement universal search, the relevancy of serch will change nd more and more people will rely less on plain jane search and more on other types of search.
As it stands now, more people are using wiki’s instead of generic search, when people use search engines they are using more local search (in other words, users are using search engines like Google to find local products) but even that could change as users rely on user review sites like Yelp.
So, while I think generic search will diminish, I also believe that specific search will flourish. So as you look to rely on the Internet for marketing, the process of SEO and SEM my change. Start to think more about how to encourage your customers to leave great reviews on review sites like Yelp.com. Check to see what your customers are saying about your business or service. Develop procedures to encourage online reviews. That way you can take advantage of new search strategies. Search is Dead, Long live search.
21 Jan 08 Why Pay Per Click Marketing Does NOT Work for Your Small Business
a recently was talking to one of my small business clients who was completely pissed off for pay per click marketing. he was frustrated because every month Google and Yahoo was charging his his credit card but he wasn’t seen any measurable success. And at dinner he said to me,” in a marketing and Pay Per Click marketing doesn’t work for my business and it’s a complete waste of money, I’m going back to the old way”.
So, as an experiment I offered to look at his local Internet marketing campaign primarily so I could understand the problem, because he wasn’t going back to pay per click marketing.
here’s what I found, my friend is a local contractor, his marketing goal is to generate leads for free estimates. So we looked at his campaign, the biggest problem was the campaign was to broad. in other words he had not clearly defined his universal selling proposition, his niche, is customer, or any of the other metrics that make Internet marketing work for small business.
You see the problem wasn’t that pay per click and Internet marketing didn’t work, the problem is that my friend’s business doesn’t have a clearly defined mission, doesn’t have a clearly defined niche, anyone that has a need for contractor is his client, so his marketing suffers because he’s competing in with every other contractor in the world.
if you’re going to use the Internet and media as a marketing tool you have to clearly understand how it works in the way it works is by creating a tightly defined niche for your business. It’s not the Internet marketing doesn’t work it’s your business that’s not clearly defined that to generally define that lacks focus and doesn’t give you the advantage of targeting a specific type of customer.
So before you go complaining about how your search marketing isn’t working, before you start complaining that you’re paying Google hundreds or thousands of dollars for little or no results, take a look at your business, take a look at how your marketing is defined and then use the power of the Internet to develop a clearly defined niche.
Use the power of the Internet to see what people are searching for and creating a niche or series of niches in your business and then watch your Internet marketing soar.
Dedicated to your success.
If you want to leverage Local Internet Marketing for your small business and looking to sharpen or create your universal selling proposition and clearly define your niche, Call me we can help
13 Dec 07 The Relationship between Your Customer & You has Changed,
What do you know about your customer, are you really listening to what they want. Check out this video. The lesson in my view is that just because you know the demographics of your customer, that is no longer enought. If your relationship with your customer is based on data and you are listening to what your customer wants, your customer will leave and when enough customers leave YOU ARE OUT OF BUSINESS. Check out this video.
We can help you build a system for listening to your client, click here
16 Nov 07 Does traditional SEO still work - Google’s Universal Search
More of a question than a comment like many people I have been watching googles move to Universal search. For those not keep tracking a Google search today is very different from less than a year ago. Now if you search Google for “St Lucia vacation”, you get a results page that includes not just websites, but blogs, news weather and videos.
So what is the impact on normal SEO strategies. Does tweaking Meta-tages, html, site mirroring, doorways and all that junk still get page rank. Or with Uni-search has Google made thos strategies obsolete. I’ve been reviewing my SEO techniques and wondering if anyone else is considering how to get organic results in a uni-search world.
Appreciate any thoughts
30 Oct 07 Pay per Call with Google’s Grand Central
The borg is still at work. As many know Google recently purchased Grand Central, a telephone number for life service. I recently signed up for Grand Central and have a new Grand Central number. The way Grand Central works is you get a single number and assign all of your telephone numbers and Grand Central will among other things ring all of the numbers, allow you to screen calls, switch phones on the same call and more. Checkout Grand Central at www.Grandcentral.com.
One of the additional features is the ability to put a “CALL ME” button on your website or blog. I put one on http://www.cash-flow-investor.com and it works perfectly. Basically, you click the button, enter you name and telephone number the service rings your phone and then connects your phone directly to my phone via Grand Central.
This is how Pay Per Call can work right now, because you can tell (via Analytics) if someone went to the call page and you know if you got the call. Every small business should register for Grand Central and start to implement this service on their website. Call me and I can show you how.
Dedicated to your success.
12 Oct 07 Using a Blog to grow your business
One of the new strategies for promoting your business is writing a blog and marketing the blog to your customers. The benefit is you can talk to your customers in an unfiltered manner, you can send them special information like sales, coupons and you can ask them questions in a survey. So blogs have real value especially if you market the blog to your customers. ( A blog is also a good way to get customer feedback and testimonials). Anyway, here is the advantage to creating a blog and an explanation of how your customers can get automatic updates using RSSLearn more about how your company can use a blog by call 215-893-5366 or email general@automated-lead-management.com
10 Oct 07 Social Networking can grow your business but…
What is a social network. Here is a short video on social networking and how you can use a social network to grow your business, find new customers and employees.For more info about how you can use social networking to grow your business contact us at 215-893-5366 or email general@automated-lead-management.com
24 Sep 07 My Campaign is Running But I’m Not Getting Sales
I recently have been watching a campaign for a friend to see how he is converting prospect to leads. Basically the campaign is converting less than 1% and my friend is dying to figure out why.
You know when staring at these campaigns with metrics is a job but just imagine what it’s like if you don’t have any metrics. You see my friend is running a Google Adwords campaign and the goal is to find a lead and convert them into a sale. What my friend doesn’t know is that there are some important factors that contribute to why prospects aren’t converting to leads. Here are some;
- Not knowing what the customer really wants. You see in the search market (actually in the I want to buy something market) there is a spectrum of buyers some closer to buying than others (A-Z Spectrum with Z being as close as possible to buying) In order to get a customer to buy you need to understand where they are in the buying cycle. In the beginning the customers is looking for information, so their search is broad but as he starts to move down the scale the prospects search gets much more specific. So you monitor your metrics to see if what the customer is searching and send different information based on where they are in the buying spectrum.
- Drip, Drip, Drip. In this world of continuous and never ending marketing messages, prospects forget about you and it’s your job to remind them constantly about your business, services, products, sales etc and the more reminding the more they are likely to remember you when they get closer to the buying decision. The also are more likely to refer you because if you are doing a good job providing valuable information they will reward you with a reference to a friend.
- Lastly (well not really because I can keep going) is message to market match. This is very important. The idea is to enter into the conversation that your customer is having in their head already. So based on where they are in the buying cycle, you enter their conversation and if you connect they reward you with a sale.
As we installed more monitoring and analytics tools, my friends conversions started to increase, the more we segmented the listed, dripped and enter the prospects conversation, my friend was rewarded with increase sales. You can do the same.
23 Sep 07 Use Twitter to tell customers about sales in your business.
If you know your customers and have a their contact info Twitter may be a great way to tell them about new items and sales in your store.
Twitter is a free service designed to let you stay in touch with friends (customers) no matter where or what they are doing. The way Twitter works is you send a message from your cell phone or computer and Twitter sends it out to your list of friends and posts the message to your Twitter page.
SOme of the compaies that have implement a Twitter stragey to increase sales include Amazon.com, Orbitbooks and more. Even if you don’t have a website Twitter can be used to tell you customers what is going on in your business.
So here is how Twitter would work for your friends(Customers). Let’s say you sell special womens bags and you have a group of customers that want to know about when new products come in or you have a sale. You invite your customers to receive special information from your business and collect their contact information. Then when you have a sale or special info you want people to know about you can use Twitter to send the message to the customers cell phone via a text message.
This is just another way way your business can use the Internet to find new customers and tell existing customers about exciting events, products and specials.
Dedicated to your success
13 Sep 07 The Key to Business Success is in the Data
Today, I watched on CNBC a show called “The Age of Wal-Mart”. The story focused on the successes of Wal-Mart, what they do to be successfull, what data they track, what they know about their customers and more. The story got me to thinking about how a small business coluld use similar technology to get the same data and grow their businesses.
One of the most obvious success technologies Wal-Mart uses is knowing their customer. Here’s what I mean. When you buy from Wal-Mart. they keep you receipt transaction for two years and analyze that data to see what the trends are for a particular product. You could do the same thing in your business if you use a POS (Point of Sale) System in your business and collected the same data.
As importantly Wal-Mart knows alot about how their marketing works. Now grant you, Wal-Mart has tons of money to track this information and pay people to compile and analyze this data, but with a small change in marketing you could do they same by using automated systems.
For example, when you create any marketing material, insted of driving the customer to the phone or the store, drive the customer to a landing page on your website. This landing page should be specifically tailored to this product and shoudl allow the customer to enter their contact information so you can continue to market to them.
This use of offline marketing drives traffic to an online system that can be connected to free software that tracks all types of data. This is truly Wal-Martesque.
BY driving customers form an offline ad to an online collection device (webpage) you can use a free product like Google Analytics to track all types of data about your customers.
For example, you can track where your customer lives by using the geographic tracking in Google Analytics. You can track what they like about your data, how long the customer spends reading your markeeting material and even if they want more information.
Combine this data with the data from your POS system and you’ve got Wal-Mart success. You can fine tune your marketing message, test pricing, test messages, test shipping or coupons and more. You can track the entire process all they way thru the sale.
This is the secret to Wal-Mart’s success and you should use similar systems to increase your businesses chances for success
Dedicated to your success
