Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

Online Marketing is Hot Again

BY TOBIAS DENGEL

PRESIDENT OF: LEADS.COM

Internet advertising is hot again, and for good reason - marketers are seeing highly successful campaigns with a return on investment that they cannot find in any other medium. But gone are the days of the banner ad. As illustrated by the highly successful Google IPO, the internet today is all about search.

Why is internet marketing so effective?

Search is really nothing more than the 100-year-old yellow pages model gone online. Why have print yellow pages been so effective? Because marketers get their message to consumers as they’re actively making a purchasing decision. No one picks up the print yellow pages to look for a plumber unless he or she needs one.

This concept translates directly into internet yellow pages and search engines on sites like Google, Yahoo!, AOL and MSN. No one searches for a term unless they are ready to buy or at least are researching the topic. That’s why being listed first under “new cars” is so important to Ford, or “DVD players” is to Circuit City. Similarly, it would be of great value for a real estate agent to be the first listing under “New York Real Estate” in the Yahoo! Yellow Pages or on Google.

Consumers are rapidly adopting the internet to find local products and services. Currently, it is estimated that 1/3 of all searches for local businesses are conducted on the internet, as opposed to print yellow pages. The chart below shows the ongoing migration from print to internet yellow pages. Given this trend, businesses should be moving about 1/3 of their print yellow pages advertising budget to the internet:

Because so many consumers are using the internet, and online advertising inventory is priced very inexpensively, the internet is generally the most cost-effective medium for businesses to attract new customers:

Launching a Local Internet Search Campaign

Consumers currently use a variety of the leading internet sites to find local merchants. These can be grouped in to two broad categories: Internet Yellow Pages and Local Search Engines. The main players are online sites such as Yahoo!, Google, AOL, MSN, Yellowpages.com, Switchboard, Infospace and others.

As a small business or local merchant, the key strategy should be to take a broad approach and appear prominently on all of these platforms. While it is possible to purchase ads on most of these sites online through their “self-serve” applications, that approach is very time-consuming, more expensive and often results in less-than-stellar results.

Your best bet is to use one of the burgeoning new local internet ad agencies, such as Leads.com. It generally costs less than you would pay on your own since they have negotiated bulk wholesale pricing, and you get expert advice in designing your ad, deciding where to place it, and tracking your results (as opposed to remembering passwords and logging into each of the major search engines).

Related Topics: Marketing, Small Business    1 Comment    

What Every Small Business Web Site Should Include

BY JEFFREY GOLDFARB

Walt Whitman wrote more than a century before the Internet was a gleam in anyone’s eye that the “art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.” The best Web sites incorporate into their design and communication the same time-tested trait observed by Whitman all those years ago.

Although creating an easy-to-use Web site for a small business can seem daunting, with the myriad technological tools and splashy graphics available, a few simple items are all a site really needs to get up and running.

Some of these things may seem preposterously obvious, but surf around a bit and it doesn’t take long to find hundreds of businesses that forget the information consumers want most.

For starters, every site should have the company’s full name and a clear, short description of what the business does. Make these two things as clear and distinct as possible. Maybe even set them off in a separate color, size or font. But make sure it’s absolutely perceptible to users who you are and what you do: nothing could be more important.

Contact information is also a must. Show visitors how to reach you by phone, and make the number visible on every page of your site, designers advise. Inform people where the business is located and with whom to correspond via e-mail to answer questions or for more information. Make sure to include city, state and country. Sound silly? You’re liable to get international visitors who will wonder if you’re in Manchester, New Hampshire, or Manchester, England.

Let Web users know what hours your business is open, and with an additional nod to worldwide users, include the time zone you’re in for good measure. Tell them which holidays you observe. Remember, the object of a Web site is to add value for your existing customers and to make it easy and inviting for new ones.

None of this primary contact information should be more than a click away and, most likely, should appear somewhere on the home page. An additional perk can be a map showing directions to a store location or company headquarters, if needed.

Even if you don’t provide a road map to your business, make sure to include a navigation menu for your Web site. This makes it easy for visitors to find precisely what they want on your site and lets them hop right to it instead of clicking down paths that lead them to information they don’t need.

And definitely make sure that a link back to the company’s home page is available from every other page on a business’ Web site.

“That really is annoying for people if they have to do a lot of clicking around to get back to the main page,” said Ron Zemke, the president of Minneapolis-based consulting firm Performance Research Associates Inc.

Tell people about yourself and management. Big chunks of Main Street may have been razed to make way for the Information Superhighway, but customers still like a personal experience if they can get one. Give people a short paragraph, and maybe even a photo, with a little background and history about the company and the people with whom visitors will be interacting.

Remember that uncomplicated sites load quicker, especially for customers using dial-up modem connections, and even for those using broadband. Keep it simple, and it’s more likely that surfers will not get frustrated and move on.

“One of the first things we learned when we did our study on use of business Web sites is that people give you eight to 10 seconds to prove yourself,” said Zemke, who co-authored “E-Service: 24 Ways to Keep Your Customers When the Competition is Just a Click Away.”

The most important thing, however, for any small business Web site is to make sure it works. Try all the links and make sure to hire a host that specifically understands the needs of small business owners.

“Having a system that supports the needs of a small business usually is not any more expensive than any other hosting,” said designer Hensley, who helped create BeyondFleece.com, whose founder recently won the Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award from the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy.

“A Web site is worthless if the system behind it isn’t powerful enough to handle enough visitors or is going down all the time or e-mail is constantly disappearing,” Hensley added.

Jeffrey Goldfarb is a New York-based reporter who writes about corporate finance, media, technology and design.

Related Topics: Internet, Small Business    No Comments    

Customer Spotlight: Highrock Christian Church

Highrock Church
Billings, MT

Founder and Pastor: Casey Scott

Highrock Christian Church is a one-year-old independent, non-denominational church that welcomes people of all backgrounds, but caters specifically to Gen X couples with small children.

Tips from Casey:

1. Look at what similar businesses do and improve on their good ideas. Other churches take breaks during the service, so we decided to do a break right in the middle of the service that is a coffee and mingle break, rather than just a stretch and bathroom break. Our congregation loves it and it sets us apart from the rest.
2. You reach who you are. You attract who you are, so don’t try to be someone you’re not.
3. Strategic consumerism works. When you’re starting out, go to the same place at the same time every week and build relationships with the people there. Those people will become loyal advocates.
4. Don’t start anything if you are not willing to fail.
5. If something isn’t working, you don’t have time to wait around and see if it eventually will. You have to be willing to change direction quickly.
6. Find someone who is going through the same things that you are. It helps to commiserate with someone who is also starting something and can empathize and share good ideas with you.

Logo

Related Topics: Customer Spotlight, Small Business    No Comments