Written by: Dan Alper
You’re an entrepreneur and you need to make more money. No matter how successful you are in business you still need to make more money. Does this sound greedy? It should, and for good reasons. You might have a family that needs providing for and making more money helps you provide for the people that you care about. You also need to make more money to satisfy all of your needs and wants. This is good because you’ll be contributing to the economy which then creates more jobs and perpetuates more opportunities for other people. Quoting Gordon Gekko, from the movie Wall Street, “greed is good”, but right now you need a plan to focus on growing your business and earning more money.
Let’s make an effort on building your company’s brand through a method called online target marketing. You might have already heard of this marketing term before but really never gave it much thought until now. Target marketing is a very effective strategy to attract new online business opportunities and put more money into your pockets.
Your target market is made up of anyone who might be interested in your products or services. Finding your target market consists of asking a few questions.
- What problem does your product or service solve?
- Who is affected by this problem?
- Where are your customers located?
Target marketing identifies an audience likely to buy products or services and advertises those products or services to that audience. When done through different online channels this form of marketing is highly effective.
Let’s use a plumbing business as an example and explore how to use the internet to drive more business opportunities. A plumber will solve water problems and people who are affected will most likely be home owners in a 50-mile radius from the plumber’s business location. When someone needs a plumber, they will most likely do some research online.
In a 50-mile radius there might be 30 different listings combined on the first and second pages of Google’s search engine results for the keyword “plumbers”. That’s a lot of competition. Statistically, people only click on results that are listed on the first two search result pages. Any company that’s not listed in the first two pages and wants to compete will have a lot of difficulty. Therefore, understanding how to compete for clicks in a small geographic area is very important.
There are seven necessary online marketing components that a company requires to be successful at converting new business from the internet. A business website, a Google my business account, a Facebook page, an Instagram account, a YouTube channel, a LinkedIn company page, and a Twitter account. If that seems overwhelming, please understand that all of these platforms work together to boost a company’s online presence.
A business website is both your brand and your story. It should convince visitors that they should become customers. The website should convey the message to its target market that the company is dependable, trust worthy, and experienced. The website’s content is very important because Google spiders every website to evaluate and score its content based on relevancy. The better the content, the more relevant the website becomes compared to its competition. This translates into a more valuable score that Google applies to the website and a higher placement result on a search result page is achieved.
Setting up a Google My Business account is a very important second step. This component helps organizations manage their online presence across Google’s products such as Search and Maps. Google makes it easy to manage the information that online users see when they search for your business and details the products and services that you offer. An interesting fact is that businesses that verify their information with Google My Business are twice as likely to be considered reputable by consumers. It also creates a forum to interact with customers by reading and responding to reviews. Google also provides insights on how customers searched for your business and where those customers are coming from. With this information a company can boost their performance with an AdWords campaign that is geo-targeted and keyword targeted to specific users.
A Facebook business page is useful for increasing brand awareness and generating sales. Ranking on the first page of Google search results is difficult for small business websites. However, having a Facebook business page and a Google My Business account will increase the chances for a small business to rank high in the search results. Your Facebook business page will help connect you with your customers, build brand awareness through Facebook Groups, create geo-targeted advertising campaigns based on profile interests, and generate free online marketing opportunities.
Instagram is fast becoming the go to application for instant information. People visit Instagram to be inspired and discover things that they care about. This includes content from brands and businesses. With Instagram, a company can add important information such as business hours, location and phone number. More importantly, a company can start posting content with relevant hashtags that targets a specific market segment and converts them online. You’ll have access to real-time metrics with insights into followers and how they interact with your company’s posts and stories.
Here is an interesting fact, YouTube has over a billion users, that’s almost one-third of all people on the internet. It is immensely popular and an important marketing component that small businesses need to take advantage of. With the advancement of online technology YouTube has evolved into a video content creator’s favorite platform. Business owners don’t need to hire a Steven Spielberg to produce video content in order to market their business. All you need is a bit of creativity and a script to broadcast your company’s message to the masses. Content distribution is simple, sharing the video from YouTube to your company’s Facebook page, LinkedIn page, and Twitter account is a common online marketing practice.
The best way to explain LinkedIn is to basically compare it to Facebook but for the corporate world. It is a social media platform for businesses and business people. A company page on LinkedIn provides a business with the opportunity to tell their story, engage with followers, share career opportunities, and scale word of mouth marketing. It’s a great way to share content such as videos from your YouTube channel and expand your global reach. Through LinkedIn, a company can provide links to their website that will increase visitor traffic and convert leads. Having a LinkedIn account also helps boost a company’s Google ranking.
The benefits of using Twitter for business is that it’s a great communication tool that can help drive brand awareness. Using hashtags in tweets allows companies to target interested users with content that they desire. Tweeting about special offers or new products can encourage users to find out more and communicate with you through the platform. It’s also a good social media platform to get customer feedback and help with customer support questions.
Setting up all of these different marketing components for the plumbing business is in essence comparable to building a strong foundation. To grow the business, we’ve identified that new clients are home owners that are located in a 50-mile radius and searching for plumbing services online. In order to convert these clients a short video ad will help attract their attention and drive traffic to the business website. The video ad is a great instrument to convey a message and uploading it to YouTube will make the ad available to the internet. Sharing the ad to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter is free. This will spread the brand’s message which creates public awareness that the plumbing business welcomes the opportunity to service new clients. With the increase of new business, it’s my strong belief that a budget of 20% of new online sales should be re-invested into paying for targeted online ads such as PPC, banner ads, and pre-roll video ads. This will grow the company’s brand’s reach, target more people who are home owners outside of the company’s social network, create more opportunities, and drive more business from the internet.
Here is an example of a short video ad that a plumbing company created. This kind of ad is very creative and can be applied to a vast number of small and medium size service businesses. Applying these marketing tactics will prove to be a cost-effective way to make more money. If you have questions or need assistance with building your company’s online presence, please contact RankWorks. We are a digital media marketing agency that specializes in helping small and medium size businesses position themselves for online growth.
