Jun 13, 2011 Posted in Marketing Ideas

Social Media and Local Businesses

Lately, small business owners have been asking me about one topic almost as much as I get asked about getting to the top of Google.  That topic?  Social media.  Specifically, whether I believe that social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube have any use in marketing a local business.

The short answer is yes – for most types of businesses.  I’m finding that businesses that sell directly to consumers (B2C) pretty much have to be on social media.

The reason?  Facebook and Twitter have the one thing that most small business websites lack.  That is traffic.  With social media you can get your message in-front of much more people than you normally can through your own website.  Of course, there is an art to doing this as people are not on those sites to buy your stuff.

What I find especially exciting about social media is the natural viral effect that these sites can produce.  Using Facebook as an example, it is so easy for someone to tell their friends about your business.  In fact, an act as simple as clicking a ‘like’ button notifies all of that person’s friends that they liked something you put out there.

Talk about word-of mouth marketing.

Of course, this can work against you as well as it is just as easy to share bad experiences with your company.  I see this as a good thing as it will eventually weed out all of the unscrupulous businesses out there.

There is another thing that I see happening that tells me that social media is here to stay.  Google is taking social media factors into consideration when showing their organic search results.  For some markets Google is actually showing a live Twitter stream right on their search results page.

There are also rumours floating about that Google is considering showing the number of fans that a business has for their Facebook fanpages.  Of course, that would suggest that a business would need a fan page in order for Google to be able to scrape these results.

Finally, to wrap this up, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the most common question I get is how to get to the top of the search engines. Well, assuming you have decent content on your site and your site is structured properly so Google will know what it is about, the most important factor contributing to good search results is the number of other sites that link to your site.

Guess what?  Social media is all about sharing information with friends.  When someone clicks a ‘like’ button on Facebook or on your own site, that action is shared with all of their friends.  Those friends can share it with their friends and so on.  Each time a button is clicked more links are created back to your site without any additonal effort on your part.  This is very powerful.

It could be argued that the links from Twitter and Facebook are no-follow links so they don’t have any influence on results but I can’t see that being the case. Of course, this is all part of Google ‘black box’ formula but I have to think that Google will not ignore 50,000 links coming back to a site regardless of where they’re coming from.

However, even if they do, wouldn’t it be worth it to invest even a little time in social media for a chance to receive some of the other results it can prosper?

 

Jun 9, 2011 Posted in Marketing Ideas

SMS Marketing Not Too Big in Vancouver Yet

When I was in the U.K. last year I saw service-based companies of all sizes making a fortune with SMS marketing. If you’re not familiar with this type of marketing it is simply building a list of subscribers that have agreed to receive your promotional messages via SMS or text messaging.

Compared to email which has approximately a 20% open rate, text messages are read 97% of the time and can see actual response rates ranging from 15% at the low end to as high as 45%. Of course, response rates depend on the quality of the offer as well as the quality of your list.

That said, restaurants, bars, pubs, nightclubs and all types of smaller service-oriented businesses were cleaning up using SMS marketing and it only made sense that Canada would follow suit. Or so I thought.

I conceptualized and built PackYourPlace.com and began testing it here in Vancouver. To say the least, the results have surprised me. First, I must mention that I’m a great marketing guy but not a strong sales person. I’ve also never tried to deal with the primary markets I was targeting – bars, restaurants and spas.

What were the Results?

I screwed up. I hadn’t done my research before jumping into this business. I hadn’t realized how hard the hospitality business had been hit and how price-sensitve many of them have become. Many cited the HST here in BC was to blame while others mentioned that the more stringent drinking and driving laws had adversely affected their businesses.

Either way, price was a big issue.

The other thing that surprised me was how, er hesitant some business owners are to try anything new. I’ve seen the results of SMS marketing first-hand so I knew I had a product that people would benefit from. However, I haven’t been able to get that across to business owners here. Many couldn’t see how their clients wouldn’t be offended when they started receiving promotional messages via SMS – even though they would only receive such messages if they requested them.

What’s the summary? I’m probably going to shelve this idea for a few months. I know it is a winner but the timing might not be right at the moment. It isn’t alwasy easy to admit when you’re wrong but in this case, it looks like I was.  Lesson learned.

Jun 8, 2011 Posted in Marketing Ideas

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May 21, 2011 Posted in Marketing Ideas

Pricing and Profitability

For years, Internet marketers have been telling us to jack our prices up to increase profitability. Since everything comes down to conversions and profit per sale, the logic is that doubling your price won’t halve your conversions so you should become more profitable.

But is that true?

With my text marketing business (www.PackYourPlace.com) I’m a little surprised to be finding that price is an issue.  I would have sworn that our pricing would be the last concern that prospective clients would have.  But that just isn’t the case (at least in Vancouver).

A recent post by marketing guru Ryan Deiss explains what he is finding.  Basically, his tests are proving the opposite of conventional wisdom.  Of course, he is selling primarily info products with huge margins so if you’re selling more traditional products you’ll want to adjust your figures accordingly.

You can view the video post here.  Unfortunately, as is often the case with Ryan, the video is a little longer than it need be. Still interesting though.

May 5, 2011 Posted in Marketing Ideas, Random Thoughts

Lisa Jimenez Gave Me the Secret to Success

I’ve been a little down lately. It seems that everything is taking longer to get going than I had planned and is costing twice as much.  Of course, that is life and when we get in these funks we need to just ‘keep on, keepin’ on’, right?

As I sometimes do for motivation I pulled out a dvd course that Vic Johnson put together.  It was a live seminar recorded in Toronto and it had a lot of the big name speakers on it.  One of them was Lisa Jimenez.

If you’ve never heard or seen her speak before I recommend that you do.  She is pretty switched on and in this particular presentation she made a statement that totally hit home for me.  This is paraphrased but it was essentially, “Most entrepreneurs are more concerned about looking good than being successful.”

What Lisa was saying is that we must be willing to be uncomfortable in order to succeed.  We must be willing to risk failure and face rejection or we have no chance of success.

Of course, she was talking about entrepreneurs but it applies to everyone.  How often have you seen someone you wanted to meet but didn’t introduce yourself?  How often have you wanted to try something new but made an excuse at the last minute?

We all do this and we’re all motivated by one thing – FEAR.  The fear of looking stupid in most cases.  This is the reason I don’t like to make cold-calls for business even though I know I have to.  It doesn’t make any sense and I’m working on changing it.

The fact is that the fear never goes away. Anyone that says they’ve conquered all of their fears is lying to you – and to themselves.  The key is to follow the old addage “Feel the fear and do it anyways.”

Of course, it is much easier said than done but it must be done.  Failure is the only other option.