Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

Imagine a World Where Customers Come to You

Aperio Marketing

With all due respect to John Lennon, I’d like you to imagine a world where you don’t have to look for new customers; instead, they find you. It isn’t hard to do.

Imagine, too, that you can track the effectiveness of your ads within hours of putting them out there. And by track, I mean you know exactly how many people have seen the ads, how many took action on it, and which ads brought in the best customers.

You may say I’m a dreamer, but this is the reality of advertising today, at least in the online world. That’s right, I’m talking about Google AdWords, and similar services from Yahoo, Microsoft, and others.

At this point you might be thinking, “This is a great idea, but it won’t work for my business; we do things differently.” Perhaps. But consider this: A dog daycare, in Oakland, California, gets 90% of their business from online leads. A yacht chartering business increased their monthly revenue by 100%. A garage specializing in converting cars to run on vegetable oil finds 95% of its business online.

Their clientele are not computer geeks, they are regular, everyday people. These are not companies that sell and ship products from an online store. They provide real, everyday services to people in very specific geographical areas. They are not interested in doing international business, per se. They just need to get people in the local area informed about what they have to offer. And they are doing it online.

One of the reasons why online marketing is so effective is that you control how much you spend; you won’t spend more than you budget. No minimums, no maximums. This is not the case with many other advertising media.

Another reason more local businesses should utilize online advertising is because it is very easy to track and measure results. In some instances results can be seen in hours.

This provides for very quick feedback on what’s working, allowing you the flexibility to tweak and optimize your message in a non-threatening environment. Once you find a message that’s working, you can take it to other media, such as direct mail post cards, email campaigns, or print environments.

If you want to continue to throw your marketing dollars to the wind, hoping for the best, buy advertising based on the selling points the sales person tells you. If you want to make sure your marketing dollars are invested in productive, results-oriented media, start with online advertising. It’s not just for online businesses. It’s for any company that wants to grow and keep their marketing efforts accountable.

           

Posted on Monday, June 9th, 2008 at 2:44 pm and is filed under Advertising, Branding, Business, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Sales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.