In Business, and especially in the busy and competitive city of Washington DC, Internet Marketing is very important to get ahead. Many small businesses are starting to understand the importance of having a presence online but they don’t really know where to start. Should it be PPC, social media, twitter, SEO, a new website..its hard to know!
Social media is the 800 lb gorilla in the room, but all aspects of online marketing are important, and the more pieces of the puzzle you use for your business, the more business you’ll be capturing. Many people believe that just having a website is enough, but is just having a building enough…even if its in the middle of a dark alley in a city where no one lives?
As a business owner you should start out by making sure that your website is not optmized for the business name, but the services that you provide. This way you’ll be getting traffic to your website for people looking for your services, not your business by name. If they were searching for your name, they weren’t new in the first place, they had to have heard of you from somewhere else first. The way that you gain more shares of the marketplace is by being noticed by those looking for your products or services that didn’t at first consider you.
Yes a flashy and nice website will help you to make sales, but if it isn’t properly optimized, and social media aspects are not integrated into the site, you won’t be getting very far. Chances are you’ll be spending thousands on a website that will bring you no business. You would have been better off buying a nice painting for your office, it might help you to close sales once you get people in the door, but it won’t help you get more people in the door. Get it?
We offer a free consultation, because we understand the complexity and confusion that comes along with trying to first get started online. Whether you just want to dip your toe in the water, or know how you rate against your competitors, or compile a full scale online marketing campaign, the consultation is where it all starts. We want to know your goals, and provide solutions for you to meet those goals, and there is nobody else out there that has the educations and experience like us. You’ve got nothing to lose, but if you don’t ever take that first step…you could lose your business to your competitors.
Many times when I sit with clients, different forms of old interruption marketing come up as possibilities for how they should spent their marketing dollars. They don’t call it “interruption marketing” they call it television, or radio, or something similar to that. When I bring up the concept of interruption marketing or permission marketing most times it need further explanation, so I’d like to do so right here for ya.
Interruption marketing is based off of interrupting potential customers into listening to a companies marketing messages. If you are sitting and watching television, you don’t sit there to see the commercials. These commercials are interrupting your television experience, and trying to get you to pay attention, but you aren’t interested in shopping for a car right now, or looking for a personal injury lawyer. They hope that SOMEONE is listening and might need what they are offering, but the conversion rates for this are despicable, usually way less than 1% conversion rates. This is the old way of marketing, and is a shot gun blast of your dollars just being sprayed among an audience of hundreds of thousands.
There is a place for interruption marketing however, and sometimes it is just necessary. With this type of marketing you don’t do it just for the sake of a high conversion rate, a lot of times if the campaigns are continually ran over a period of time it will help your company brand itself. The more times that people see your marketing messages on television, the more you will be recognized, and the higher the chance is that later on when they actually do need those services, they will think of you.
People see over 10,000 marketing messages per day. Our subconscious mind has learned to block them out. We don’t even see most of them anymore, its just like breathing. We have been exposed to continuous marketing that we never asked for, and don’t want to see, and out human anatomy is helping us to stop seeing them. Is this the type of marketing that you want to do? And then there was permission marketing…
Permission marketing is marketing that is being actively asked for at the exact moment, and delivered to the customer at that exact moment. As opposed to shotgun blast TV or Radio commercials, permission marketing is only delivered to those people that are actively asking for it RIGHT THAT SECOND. Do you think the conversion rates are higher than the others? Exponentially higher!
It works like this. You go to google, and you type in “House Painter Alexandria VA”. You are now giving any house painter in alexandria va the PERMISSION to market to you. You WANT to see different painters in alexandria va. You are going to purchase, and you want it now. This is a whole new ball game, giving small businesses the ability to market their business ONLY to those that are actively looking for them. No waste. Permission marketing is much more accepted by the customer, and they are actually HAPPY to see your advertisements and marketing. They want to know about you, and what you can do for them, and they have their credit card in their hand ready to go!
If you’d like to know more about Permission marketing and how you can use it for your business, product, or service, just leave a comment below. We love to educate, and we love the opportunity to share out knowledge with small businesses and marketing managers to help them to grow.
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An optimum online marketing strategy is very important. You can’t start anything without a plan. Start with the things that you can do easily, and plan to work on the things that you can’t.
As the owner of the top Internet Marketing Agency in Northern VA, I know the importance of a strategic plan for your marketing. Many small businesses start marketing like a shotgun blast, hoping for a flood of new business that will last forever with one yellow pages ad.
Come on now, we know this just isn’t the way that the world works. You need to ensure that you have a well built sales funnel, getting new prospects built into the top, warming them up throughout the middle, and closing them at the bottom…automatically.
Sound far fetched? This is the age we live in, and technology and the Internet have revolutionized the way small business should be marketing. Its not the economy that you should blame, its your marketing. Just like the locomotive was replaced by the car, old forms of advertising are dead, and if you don’t change with the times you’re doomed.
If your clueless, Google has a plethora of information on every aspect, but something this can be overwhelming. Think about outsourcing these efforts to professionals who know what they are doing.
Think it might be too expensive? You’re not thinking like a business owner. What is the lifetime value of a customer to you. Is it $100, $1000, $10000? These are the numbers you need to be looking at, then run your marketing campaign strictly based on the numbers. If you find a form of marketing that brings in more money than you spent, you’ve got a winner. Wouldn’t you like to put out a dollar and get two back. This is marketing, and this needs to be your mindset.
Today I woke up to a DC earthquake. Is it the end of the world? Whats going on here? One thing I know, this is NOT business as usual.
There have been earthquakes in this area, but never as big as this, but I don’t think its the end. I think its the beginning. Changes are happening all over the world, and its all about mindset, it can mean the glass is half empty or half full, and whatever you put into your mind is the truth.
That takes me to a favorite quote of mine, “Whether you think you can, or you can’t, either way you are right”, Henry Ford. We use these natural disasters and weather mysteries as a way to strike fear and make excuses, where is your mind at?
It’s the same thing in business. As a business owner, your most important asset is your mind. Do you think you can, or you can’t? Either way you’ll be right. Business is not all up, sometimes its down, but you’ve got to keep your long term focus.
Don’t let day to day things such as news and doom and gloom distract you from the goals you’ve set for yourself and your life. They are put here to test you, to make sure you really want it. I don’t know about you, but it’ll take more than an earthquake in DC to keep me from meeting my goals. I suggest you get your mind right.
This is a debatable topic for sure. The short answer…it depends. If you are in a competitive marketing, then you’ll be looking at a full time job ahead of you. If you are in a niche area, a few hours a week will get you ahead of your competition over time.
Let me talk a little bit about how SEO works before I go into what I think is best to spend your valuable time on.
SEO works like this. The search engines don’t see how pretty how website is, or how ugly it is for that matter. It doesn’t care about what pictures you have on your site (for the most part) or any of the other fancy things that you’ve done to it to get it to look nice. The only thing that Google and other search engines see is the code of your site.
SEO is broken down into 2 parts. On-Page optimization and off-page optimization. In the old days, on-page optimization held a lot of weight, and it was easy to manipulate your page in a certain way and achieve great rankings with it. You could just stuff your keywords on the page or hide them in the background of the site and then you’d be ranking. Yea…that doesn’t work anymore. In fact it will get your site penalized or even banned from the search engines. On-page optimization, or the things that you do to your site to help the rankings, has much less weight that it used to, but it is still important.
On-page optimization helps the search engines to see what category your site belongs on. A big mistake I see people make is that they title their page the business name, not the business category. Now you are in a category all of your own, and the only thing that the search engines know you for is the name of your business. If you think about this for a second, this is dead wrong. The only people that will find your site will be those that already know you by name, which means they are not new business prospects. That’s a waste. Instead title your page the business category so that Google knows that you’re a plumber, or a carpenter, or a dentist. Like I said, this is only a small part of the battle.
Off-page optimization is how the search engines really factor who you are, and where you should rank within the search engines. Basically it works like this, first they look at your site and see what category you belong in. Then it looks to see how many links your site has pointing to it to see where in that category it belongs. Essentially, the more links you have, the higher you will rank. The search engines count these links as votes, and the more votes you have the better.
The reason for this is that if sites out there are willing to link to your site, and they are talking about what you and your business does, this looks pretty good in Google’s eyes. Its no different than referrals in the offline world, the more people that are talking about your business the better, its no different here.
Now…SEO is a highly evolutionary process, and at this point, its not about just building simple links and blog posts anymore. Every day it is becoming more and more important to be putting out high quality content on a regular basis to get noticed. That’s why here at Dominant Approach we use online video to get attention for our clients. It does 2 things. First, the videos and other high quality content that we generate are popular by themselves, and drive traffic to your website. However, these pieces of content also link back to your site, taking care of your off-page optimization, or link building. The more videos and content you make, the more you dominate. Same concept as traditional SEO, but with our own twist that helps you to totally dominate your competition.
To learn how to start using the power of online video and SEO, download our free guide. You’ll learn everything you need to know about getting started, from equipment, to framing, to lighting, to uploading for maximum exposure. We’re in the business of putting out high quality content too, and this is just something that we’ve put together for you to differentiate yourself from your competitors, and start to see how the Internet can help you to generate endless leads for your small business.
As always, if you felt that this information was helpful, click the like button below. If you have any questions or want to discuss any of the topics that was written about today, just leave a comment below. To your success.