5 Small Business Marketing Tips

What are you doing to improve your marketing right now? Most small businesses have a few strategies they use to market their business on a regular basis, but there is always room for improvement. In challenging economic times, small businesses can be well-served in reviewing their current marketing investments and making adjustments to improve performance. When economic conditions improve, they will be best positioned to accelerate growth. Here are a few suggestions you can use to improve the performance of your small business marketing today:

Reduce the Size of Print Ads
If you still find value in print ads and plan on continuing to buy print space we recommend that you reduce the average size of your ad layouts.  You can convey the same message and information while allowing yourself to buy additional print ads in other publications or to use the money for an alternative source of advertising.

Employ Untraditional Marketing Tactics

There are plenty of ways to go about marketing in ways that people have never considered before.  A new trend that many companies are beginning to notice is the power possessed in these wildly popular social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter.  Consider a social media marketing campaign; the only cost is your time.

Don’t Advertise Like Big Businesses

Your small business simply cannot afford to advertise in the same manner that traditional big businesses do.  The enormous ad campaigns that big businesses conduct are geared at building brand awareness to help bolster future sales.  This type of advertising is inefficient for your typical small business; you must focus your advertising money on making sales now!  Considering how most people search online for services offered by small businesses, the best way to reach these people is through a search engine optimized website.

Leverage Your Customers

Many companies have begun to build out preferred customer programs that are geared at leveraging existing customers into a sort of sales and marketing resource while offering them exclusive benefits.  There are a number of ways to structure this and while it takes some time to manage and a bit of money to get started it can eventually grow into its own lead generation channel.

Cross-Promote with Other Small Businesses

Get in touch with some non-competing businesses that serve the same target market as your small business. Offer to publicize their product or service to their customers in return for the same.  As well consider the possibility of packaging or bundling the two services together; some partnerships that have done this have been extremely successful.

Do you have other suggestions small businesses can use to improve their marketing? Please share your advice in the comments on this post.

Is Your Small Business Socially Acceptable?

Our society is becoming more and more interconnected each and every day.  Today people are constantly posting “tweets” on Twitter and updating their Facebook status; and in many cases, doing so from mobile devices.  Within these social media channels there is a great deal of marketing potential available for businesses willing to step outside their comfort zone of “tried and true” marketing tactics.

The costs are nil, aside from the time you decide to devote to the campaign.  This can have major implications for small businesses because if you can effectively generate sales from the campaign you are doing so at zero cost.

Currently there are 300,000 small businesses actively participating in some form of social media marketing.  Only a handful of these companies are focused on using professional social networking sites such as LinkedIn while others utilize platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and/or MySpace.

There are a lot of reasons companies start marketing through social media, for starters these channels provide a great way for building an audience of potential buyers quickly.

Bing: Could it be the next Google?

So Bing is out, will it be the next great search engine? Only time will tell.  But at least you can decide for yourself whether or not you like it.

Even though Bing is not completely live yet, Web surfers can still test the interface to get acquainted with it.  Unlike Google’s ultra-simplistic homepage, Bing’s homepage changes each day, with a new background of some picturesque location. There are a number of trivia questions regarding the location of the background integrated directly into the background.  These trivia questions redirect the person reading them to the various Bing applications such as, Maps, Videos, Images and News; a sort of devious advertisement of Bing’s search features.  As for the layout, Bing is very user-friendly, boasting a suggested search list on the left-hand side as well as a recent search history displayed right there on the homepage.

Customers Are Looking for Your Small Business Online

Will They Find What They’re Looking For?

Consumers now use the Internet more than any other source when it comes to searching for local businesses. In fact, a recent Nielsen study found that 82% of consumers use the Internet to search for local services – more than any other source.

This is big news for your small business, since it means consumers are looking for the goods and services you provide in search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com. The big question is, “Will they find you?” If you’re still pouring all your marketing energy into phone book, newspaper or billboard advertising, you may not be reaching consumers where they’re looking. A small shift in resources to the Web could significantly increase business for your location, and help you reach more interested buyers.

Consumers have changed the way they search for your business. According to the Nielsen research, consumers are using the Yellow Pages less and the Internet more than just two years ago. If you’re not familiar with how the Web reaches your customer, try to do a search for your business in your local market; you’ll most likely find that your competition shows up in those searches. They are probably getting a lot of the customers who went to the Web looking for you. If you’re not spending at least a small percentage of your marketing budget to fix this problem, your competitors will continue to get your customers.

There are many different providers of services to help you optimize your website for search engines. If you don’t have a website, companies like Radius Online provide you with one for free, when you sign up for on of our local search engine optimization programs.

Starting your local online marketing program today will make a significant impact on your sales and profits in 2009. Feel free to contact us if you’d like to learn more about how to reach customers that are already looking for you at 1-866-575-8057 or sales @ radiusonline.com.

Target Longer Search Terms to Drive More Traffic

We run into this a lot. Customers want to show up in search terms for the types of goods or services they offer, so they go out and optimize their pages for that keyword. The local bakery down the street makes sure they use the work “cupcake” in their page title, and repeats it 100 times on the page. This is the wrong way to optimize your pages for the following reasons:

• Unless it’s a national chain, the baker may only sell to customers in the local area. Even if they dominated search results, they’d attract a lot of interest from customers they can’t serve.
• The competition for one-word (or even three-word) search terms is tremendous. Your chances of getting on the first page are very low, unless you’re in an obscure market or have a ton of budget to throw at expert search engine optimization.
• Customers rarely use short search terms anymore. For example, a recent Hitwise report shows that longer search queries (those averaging five or more words) increased 10% in January, compared to a year ago. During the same time period, short search terms (one to four words) decreased 2%. Consumers are using longer (and more geographically focused keywords) to find what they’re looking for.
• Customers are searching locally. It’s estimated that more than 86% of all Web searches are now local. Many of these consumers are searching for a local vendor to make a purchase offline. Why optimize your site for broad generic terms when customers are looking for long, descriptive terms?

Combine Long Search Terms With Your Location

One approach that works great for small businesses serving local customers is to target longer search terms with a geographic reference – for example, “cupcake bakery in atlanta georgia” rather than “cupcake bakery specialists.” While the bakery in this example may bake much more than cupcakes, they can target specific terms one at a time to attract traffic across different interests. You should generally have a different section of your site that talks about each of your unique product or service offerings individually.

Another example would be in the auto repair industry, where we current manage local search for more than 1,500 customers. We help customers optimize their websites for local searches across their most profitable jobs. Rather than optimize a site for “atlanta auto repair”, we might focus in on “atlanta transmission repair” or a specific make or model related repair.

The key with these tactics is not to use one laser-focused tactic, but rather hundreds (or more). While there may only be 3-4 unique searches per month in your local area for a highly-targeted term, multiplying that across 1,000 search terms can generate significant traffic for your site.

Want to learn more about local search engine optimization for your small business? Please visit http://www.radiusonline.com.

Why Your Small Business Needs a Website (And What to Do About It)

If you own a small business, it should be common sense that you need a website. We’ve had thousands of small business owners disagree with us over the years about this point – many of them now have websites. Of course, the majority of them don’t have websites – and they continue on a flatline of revenue growth. If you don’t have a website, but you want to grow your small business, you need to reconsider one of those decisions.

In a survey published by JupiterResearch last year, they found that just 36% of online small businesses – that is, businesses with fewer than 100 employees and an Internet connection – have a website. Said another way, 64% of small businesses don’t have a website. Even of those 36% that do have a website, we estimate less than a third of them fully-levarage online marketing to drive traffic and sales to their business.

Who has a website and who doesn’t should not be your justification for getting one, but you should consider the competitive advantage having a website would deliver for your business. Think of it as a sign for your busines online. When people walk by your business on the Web, they do so through search engines. They are looking for your business online.If you don’t have a website, you don’t have a sign, and therefore don’t exist.

Are People Really Using the Internet to Find Us?

If you don’t believe that you need a website, consider the following numbers for a couple of minutes:

• 94 million adults use the Internet every day
• 64% access search sites like Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask each day
• 86% use search engines to conduct local searchs (looking for goods and services in their local area)
• 43% are seeking a local merchant to buy something offline

There are most likely thousands of people searching for the goods and services you offer – in your local area – every single month. If you have a website, your chances of capturing some of that action are much better. Of course, having a website is not the end all, be all. You should optimize your website so that search engines can better help people find you online (more on that in a later post – for now, you have to have a website).

How many people are searching for the goods and services you offer each day? If you don’t have a website – or some other form of online marketing – you’ll most likely never know.

Our Favorite Small Business Marketing Blogs and Websites

While we hope we’ll grow the Radius Online blog into a top small business marketing resource for you, we thought in the short term it would help if we shared some of our favorite small business marketing websites and blogs. In no particular order, here are some of our favorites. If you have suggestions for other resources that would be of interest to small businesses and entrepreneurs, please share your feedback and comment on this post.

Duct Tape Marketing’s Small Business Marketing Blog

Duct Tape Marketing’s Small Business Marketing Blog is one of the best places to keep up with small business marketing strategies and tactics. John Jantsch, an award winning author, speaker and small business marketing expert, provides all the information you will need to keep your marketing fresh, exciting and effective.

Websites like Entrepreneur.com can help you learn how to market your small business.

Entrepreneur’s Marketing Website

Entrepreneur.com is the online component of Entrepreneur magazine. The magazine’s website has a special small business marketing section that provides an extensive range of articles on topics ranging from online marketing and branding, to website development and social media.

Seth Godin’s Blog

If you’ve never heard of Seth Godin, you probably haven’t read much about marketing in the past decade. Godin probably writes the most popular marketing blog in the world – popularity driven by a long string of best-selling books, including The Dip, Meatball Sundae, Purple Cow, Free Prize Inside and Permission Marketing. We highly recommend you read Seth’s blog, but you should alse read his books – they’re great.

8 Small Business SEO Tips You Can Use on Your Small Business Website

How Can I Optimize My Small Business Website for Search Engines?

This is one of the most common questions we hear from people that call Radius Online for the first time. People want to know how to drive traffic to their websites. While a search engine optimization (SEO) expert can do all the work for you, there are a couple of things you can probably do on your own to optimize your site for search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com.

These simple tips can help you get your website listed on search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com.

First off, search engine optimization is really about how search engines see and organize the content on your small business website – along with every other website on the Internet. The suggestions below are simple things you can do to improve how search engines view your web pages – most likely helping to improve the traffic you drive to your small business website.

Hold the Phone: Web More Popular for Finding Local Businesses Than Phone Books

Local Search More Popular Than Phone Books

Phone books still make good booster seats around the Thanksgiving table, but they are quickly using their appeal as the best way to find a local business. According to the second annual Local Search Usage Study from TMP Directional Marketing, conducted by comScore, consumers are turning to search engines first to find local businesses. According to the study, 31% of Americans begin with search engines to find local business information, compared to 30% that start with the good old phone book.

Also of interest in the study, researchers found that while the majority of research is done online, consumers still make most of their purchases offline. This means more and more potential customers are searching for your goods and services online, so they can do business with you offline.

As far as trends to watch, the study also found that 1-in-5 consumers with Internet-enabled phones have performed a local search on their phone. You can expect these numbers to increase as more and more consumers move to Internet-enabled devices like the popular iPhone.

Local SEO for Retail Chains and Franchises

Local SEO is Good Complement to Store Locators

Thinking Beyond the Store Locator

It seems like every retail or franchise website has a “find a location near you” option now. You type in your location, and it spits back a list of locations sorted by their distance to you. Some smart marketers even take that a step further and enable you to click on the search results to see the location on the map. But I’m still amazed by how many people don’t take things one micro-step further – it would make such a huge difference in their local search engine optimization success. That’s what this post is about.

Here are some of my suggestions for improving the local search engine optimization (local SEO) results for your retail chains or franchisees…