The future of Metzger Business
Metzger business has been used to keep track of my rambelings as an experienced Internet and ecommere business architect who is interested in social media. I am also very interested in small business and my community so I’ve decided to turn this endevor into an experminent. I’d like to help small businesses and my community by making this a platform for publishing. I’ve invited a number of small businesses jnthe community to start posting articles one a regular basis. I hanlve room for several additional business to post as well. On top of that I’ll be doing business reviews of businesses in the Marietta and Roswell comunities. I’ll continue to write about how I think social media can help both small and large business and how this site helps the businesses that participate on it.
You’ll see chAnges in the site Over the coming weeks and months but we are going to start slowly. So please enjoy drop us some comments and tell you friends in marietta and Roswell. If for a business and would like to contribute please feel free to reachout to me. Kevin [at] Metzgerbusiness [dot] com
Web Marketing for small local businesses – Does Your advertising reach your audience
ARE YOU SURE IT REACHES YOUR AUDIENCE?
Traditional advertising has lost a lot of it’d audience. News papers have lost their audiences. Billboards are practically overlooked! Nobody watches local tv anymore. On top of all that all these are expensive mediums in which to advertise and there is a good chance you won’t hit your target market even if you do advertise in the local paper.
So if all these mediums are expensive and they don’t hit your target market as effectively as you would like, what medium brings the best, cheapest, most targeted traffic? Paid Search.
What is Paid Search?
Paid Search is anywhere where you pay a sight such as a search engine to place a little ad and a link that will drive internet traffic to your site.
Who offers paid search?
Google, Bing, Yahoo, Facebook, blogs, you name it the site probably provides a form of paid search and there a many forms of paid search.
What are the forms of paid search?
There are a number of forms of online advertising such as cpc (Cost per click) you only pay when someone clicks on your add, CPM(cost per thousand)- cost per thousand impressions, CPL (Cost per lead) – you pay for leads in a more traditional form of lead generation and you don’t own the customer right out but the service can be very effective ie. Service Magic, there is also affiliate advertising but I consider that a completely different animal and not necessarily useful to the small business guy.
What should I use and How Do I use it?
Assuming you have a web site and it does a good job of converting browsers to customers, then CPC – cost per click is by far the cheapest form of advertising available other than word of mouth. We’ll explore CPC later this week in another post. The other advantage of CPC advertising is that usually you can target it to only show to people in a specific postal code who search for a specific term at a specific time of day. This is great if you have a limited budget to spend on advertising and you want to drive extremely targeted traffic. Traffic of this type is often looking to buy. Can you get any better than that?
Using CPM also assumes that you have a web site and it does a good job converting browsers to customers. The problem with CPM is that you will pay for the number of impressions (Number of times users of a web site see the ad) no matter how many clicks you get. The one traditional advantage over cpc is that you can control your costs. However in recent years you can now control you cpc costs much more effectively and generally target your audience much more effectively. However if you find a blog that speaks about your industry and seems to target your local market then CPM might be effective but generally I’d recommend against it.
CPL – cost per lead advertising is generally much more expensive and while you may find some platforms that don’t require you to have a web site most web-based CPL programs will expect that you do have a web site and it should generally be good about converting browsers to customers. The best CPL programs work by consolidating a group of businesses such as home improvement assuring that you meet a set of standards and then offer a number of programs to provide you leads to gain their customer’s business. These sites gamble that they can use other forms of advertising to drive traffic to their site cheaply and then turn over the lead to you to follow-up on. The real value to you is the lead is truly pre-qualified. There are companies out there that don’t do a good job of pre-qualification and you’ll end up wasting money so be careful when using this type of service and check it out thoroughly.
Web Marketing for Small Local Business – Other Local Search Directories
Last week we covered an overview of local search and how to register with the local feature of each of the big three search engines. If you want a review on how to register see: Google, Yahoo, Bing.
Today we’ll discuss other local search directories. These directories provide a large amount of local search traffic and are growing in popularity. Each of them has different features and are attractive for various reasons. Today’s blog is simply a listing of the options available. It doesn’t hurt to get listed in all or most of these forms depending on what your business does and the value the local search provides.
- Yelp
- Kudzu
- CitySearch
- Craig’s List
- Local.com
- Service Magic
- ibegin
- insider pages
- Judy’s book
- infoUSA
- MagicYellow
- MetroBot
- Search Site
- Yellowpages.com
- yp.com
- YellowUSA.com
- acxiom.com
- Discoverourtown.com
- pinpointpages.com
- merchantcircle.com
While these sites aren’t necessarily the most heavily searched sites they are targeting local people who are performing local searches and looking to buy. So when a customer does find your business on these sites converting that person to a buying customer becomes easier. Registering at these sites expands your reach and your personal web.
Tweet Strategy, Conversion, and Measurement
I went to visit my Chiropractor today. We traded for some services so occasionally we discuss business. I brought up his tweet strategy and asked if he had any idea if what he has been doing on Twitter is helping out. Answer – “Not Really.”
Hmmm. I say “Let’s examine this and see if we can develop a strategy that will allow you to measure your success and hopefully build your practice.” So after some discussion here is the strategy and requirements we came up with. These requirements are fairly general so they can be applied to any business. The strategy is simple so it too can be applied to any business. Try it use the measurements and you will find success on Twitter and maybe some more conversions. By the way this strategy can be used in Facebook or any other social networking site that broadcasts statuses.
1) Tweet Positive uplifting tweets that enhance your brand. Use a twitter sentence structure that follows the format what’s the Problem, What to do, positive result. i.e. work got you stressed out, get adjusted now, sleep great tonight – vist me to find out more http://bit.ly/123456
2) We also provided an action for the user at the end of the tweet. By the way the above tweet still leaves me 28 characters to play with.
3) Notice that I use a bit.ly url. There is 1 very important reason to use a URL shortening service and that is to measure how many people clicked on your link. The second reason is to save space. So now I have a measurement to see how successful my tweet was. Using bit.ly is easy by the way simply login and enter the URL you want shortened. Actually it’s slightly more complicated then that but I’ll cover this in another post.
4) So by now you must be asking what is the URL going to and why. AHHHH. The landing page, conversion page or squeeze page (I hate the term squeeze page!). This is a simple page that has a form for the person to fill out. This should not be a long sales page in this case. A chiropractor is a professional and shouldn’t dropt to the sleazy level that many long form sales letters drop to. In this case we’re offering a free telephone consultation. The page should briefly follow the same format as the tweets Explain problems, how chiropractic can help, what the results will be and offer the free consult. The objective is to generate a warm lead. The doc can now follow up with the potential patient.
The form should be simple and to the point. It should collect the person’s name, email, and phone. The email should be used only as a single contact unless otherwise stated. This is not a news letter sign up it is a lead generation form for already hot prospects.
5) Measure, Measure, Measure. The tweets, the click troughs’, the page visits, the page conversions. Tweak and Repeat.
Good luck this is a simple but effective strategy.
Google AdWords – On the Radio?
Google has started an add campaign on the radio to encourage people to advertise with Google. I have never previously heard any advertising for Google outside of the web and certainly not for their service. This is likely an early sign that BING is beginning to hurt their ad revenue. Non the less AdWords can be a very powerful tool for a business that does not have front page placement in the natural search results. I’ve put together a short video explaining how to sign up for AdWords and how to use it effectively to drive traffic to your site. The campaign I demonstrate is for local businesses that want to drive local traffic to their sites for advertising purposes.
Sign up Process
Create Local Ad
The remainder of the process simply sets up your billing preferences. Because I don’t intend to create this add I did not complete this process but you have 2 options in the billing process. Option 1 lets you post pay or pay after the ad has run and Option 2 allows you to pre-pay the add. Option 2 was added recently to help control costs. Google will never spend more than what you have in the account if you pre-pay the ads. This second option was added after complaints and law suits because of Google over billing customers budgets.
If you as a business have a web site that promotes your business but you do not rank high in the search engines then running local ads with Google AdWords is an extremely effective strategy.
Social Media part of the College graduate DNA
Kids that are entering the work force this year have been using social media in one form or another since they started high school. They grew up with MySpace always being a part of their vocabulary. The iPhone came out during their freshman year of college. Twitter to this generation is a tool for older folks although I think that’s changing. Theses kids have posted video’s to the web of teachers talking on the phone in class. They have recorded phone calls where parents have lost it and posted the audio. They know how easy it is to use multimedia and integrated it with social media to get buzz, publicity, notoriety, and make things happen. This group completed homework assignments through social network platforms and have even used it to cheat, although cheating will be considered collaboration now that they are in the work force.
So what does this mean for business? The younger workforce will continue to be more and more comfortable with social media, and building online brands, and collaborating together online. While some of the older generation does not feel you get to know people through social media, this generation knows that you are who you project yourself to be. This trait of projecting personalities can be very valuable to businesses if they take the opportunity to cultivate the values they want their employees to project. If your business wants to project honesty, commitment, hard work it’s very easy to do and a benefit to projecting these values through social media is that the values often manifest themselves in real life. It’s hard to project one set of values and live by another. I know personally I’ve become a much better person because of my projections.
The additional value collaborative tools provide is the ability to maximize the employee knowledge base. Collaboration through micro-blogging allows the community to see status on all projects that are currently in progress and provides the opportunity to provide input if the community has expertise to provide. Of course there need to be policies in place so that these tools are not abused but most people at work use the tools for work and if the larger community is using the tools correctly then they will police and moderate the community for you.
Finally on individual projects tools such as wiki’s provide the ability for a team to collaborate on documentation, decisions, and email like communication that should be captured via a company knowledge base. Tracking these communications via a wiki allows for the companies knowledge capital to be centralized and available. Now anyone can see why a decision was made even years later. This process allows future decisions to be better informed and made with all detail necessary. The best wiki tools search all attached documents as well as standard wiki pages and they allow you to convert or attach emails, documents, spread sheets and presentations to the wiki. This provides truly powerful knowledge content management and the new workforce is not only comfortable with it but will demand it from their employers.
Don’t forget that providing these tools helps to raise the moral of your work force by provide better communication and delivering on their expectations. Moving to Enterprise 2.0 technologies is no longer an option but a necessity. It’s only a matter of time if you haven’t started the process already.
Client Integrations
There are many service companies out there that have to do client integrations so that they can best serve their clients. So what should I expect in the way of support as a client and how easy should a company make it for me to integrate?
Let’s start from the beginning. The Sales Process:
During the sales process the service company should know what types of questions to ask so they can recommend the most efficient and effective way to integrate with your company. They should already have a profile of companies that are similar in size, function, industry, technology infrastructure and revenue so they know how to recommend integration. I know I know you’re special and different and so is everyone else. For that matter so is every project I have ever work on yet somehow they always get developed through the same processes even if it’s agile, XP, or some other methodology. In the end the methodology is always get the requirements, design, build and test. So as I was saying the service company should know approximately where you will fit into their integration process. The service company should be able to explain why you fit into that integration level and approximately how much effort it will be to integrate with them based on past experience. Obviously they should also be able to explain the benefits of the integration to your organization.
Once there is agreement to move forward with the service the sales person will begin gathering a pre-defined set of data. Ideally this information will be written down on a nice check list that can be presented to the customer with definitions of the needed information and a short explanation of why the information is needed. If the service company has this information put together in this manor then you know they really have their stuff together.
The next step in the process will be for the sales person to bring back the information collected from the customer to the integration team and review what is needed for the specific customer as well as finalize on the decision of which integration is appropriate for the customer. The integration team will then put together the standard set of documentation pertaining to the defined integration level including project plans, technical documentation, communications plan, and any other supporting documentation.
It is now time to schedule a meeting with the customer and their development team. All documentation should have been provided and reviewed before the meeting begins. The goal of the meeting should be to answer any questions about the integration and build plans for implementation. There obviously may be other meetings and discussions along the way to facilitate the process but this outlines a smooth and well established path to integration.
Look for my next article on how can Social Media and Enterprise 2.0 better faciliate this process.
How many ways can twitter be used
One hundred and forty characters doesn’t give you much space but it sure as heck gives tons of flexibility. I’ve been a member of the Twitterverse for nearly 2 months now, actually longer so let me active member for 2 months. In that time I’ve learned that twitter is
1) The fastest news service on the planet
2) Incredible for personal branding.
3) An awesome research tool. – You can find the best most current and relevant information on virtually any topic.
4) Goofy – Twitter’s twitters are flat out funny.
5) Incredible market research in your local area or for that matter overall market research.
6) Great for company branding.
7) Might take over the world.
Drives traffic to your site like no other tool including all other social media forums.
9) Creates viral buzz about a product
10) And now flat out buy tweets from twitters – provided by services such as tweetroi and Izea.
As I was writing this article I just found a new twitter – You can now follow dead president John Quincy Adams brought to my attention by @stonepayton.
As a tool twitter is too public to provide corporations the ability to communicate internally. Even though you can set up private networks in twitter I’m not familiar enough with the security and I certainly wouldn’t recommend to my company that they use it for anything that we want to protect.
That said if a twitter like tool is set up internal to a company intranet, it can really be useful. Companies that want to share information about what employees are working on and even help teams become more cohesive will find incredible value in this tool that simply lets you write short sentences about “What are you doing now?” There are companies contemplating using twitter like tools to replace status reporting and others who will use it to find internal resources with answer to questions that come up in every day business.
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