Metzger Business

March 2, 2011

Talking DADVocate Project

Filed under: Musings,Social Media — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 9:45 pm

I don’t usually talk directly about my other projects on this blog as it is geared to a discussion on social media and business. However I form many of my ideas for this blog by executing them over on The DADvocate Project or through other various outlets. Today however I’m going to solicit this audience directly. If you are a reader of this blog and you are a dad then please go over to The DADvocate Project and take the Survey. If you are a reader of this blog and are not a dad then you most likely have a dad and or are married to a dad. Please ask them to take the survey.

The DADvocate Survey was put together last year as an effort to define who today’s dads are. In the media and press dads tend to get a bad rap and honestly Dads are not a lazy beer drinking group who sit on the couch and do nothing. Dads are also no longer the sole bread winners in the family and our societal role as men in families is changing. By the way our spending habits are changing as a result of the family dynamic change too.

The DADvocate survey looks how and where we dads are spending our time and in some cases money. Over 390 people have taken the survey thus far and I’m closing the survey in May. I hope to have close to 500 respondents by then but to make that happen I need your help. Please take the survey now or tell some friends. Heck post about it on facebook, twitter or linkedin. Thank you in advance.

February 15, 2010

Play – Roswell, Ga

Filed under: Roswell Business Review — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 8:15 pm

This is an unsolicited w/o interview review of Play in Roswell Ga.

Overview

Play is an awesome facility where children have the opportunity to enjoy trampolines, ball pits, inflated moon walk type jumpies, playing with parachutes, slides and other gymnastic type equipment. They have play areas for little kids too; sand tables, trains, and more. Play is a great place to take the kids for a birthday and they even offer opportunities to drop your kids off on Saturday nights.
Play also has a parents lounge but it seems to need a little work at least on the weekends. I would suggest Internet access, coffee and perhaps playing something on the tv.

play 3

Experience

We visited Play last weekend for a birthday party. They always do a great job of getting the kids involved in the activities and the kids working the parties are well trained. They know how to interact with the children and are good about keeping to a schedule that keeps the kids interested.

We have not hosted a party there but based on how they organize it I would be willing to.

play 4

Online presence

Play’s online presence consists of a web site and a Facebook page. They also maintain a news letter.

I signed up for the news letter the other day and did not receive an introduction news letter. I also signed up to be added as a friend on Facebook and have not yet been added. This is almost a week ago now. The web site is great and provides all the details about when they are open, when you can bring your kid in to Open Play and when they offer “Kids night out” or babby sitting. They also have classes and even free offerings such as story hour. It’s great that they list all this on their web site.

play2

Recommendations
I believe Play is missing a few crucial opportunities to leverage their existing web site and electronic media for marketing purposes and to bring in additional business.

For a business like Play it makes sense to send an initial news letter/Autoresponder along with a coupon for signing up. Anybody who signs up for this news letter obviously is a potential, if not already a, customer. Since this customer went to the trouble to provide you an email address an is inviting you to stay in communication with them you should give them an incentive to come in and Play. The news letter is the perfect opportunity to do this.

Facebook – The Facebook page can be a real opportunity to create a community between all of your customers but it won’t work if you don’t get people interacting immediately. I would also move from the Friend page to more of a Fan page.

A Facebook fan page is searchable by the search engines and someone looking for Play type activities in Roswell might find the page and Bam New customer. In the fan page you can host conversations and get an interactive conversation going. You can also host pic’s and video that your customers might enjoy. The other major advantage to Facebook Fan pages are the ability to advertise on Facebook. Facebook PPC (pay per click) advertising is incredibly well targeted. You can advertise to women between the age of 27 and 40 who live in specific postal codes. The integrated Fan page gives an excellent place to direct those parents to. Also there is less administration because anybody who wants to can become a fan.

Finally if were examining Play’s online strategy I would consider a blog. The blog can be updated weekly with video testimonials, each week’s events, and even child safety or child care type tips. The blog could be linked from the existing web site which is excellent and provide parents a way of staying in touch with Play and other Play parents. Play might even consider video taping a Story Time or some other event to help bring the Play experience to parents on-line.

I don’t have any business suggestions for Play today as I’ve only been able to observe the operation and online strategies. I believe Play has an excellent operational strategy in place since all employees seem to be well trained and enjoy working with young kids.

All in all if you are a parent in North Atlanta you need to take your kids to Play and check it out. They are awesome.

play 1

January 12, 2010

Response to Reeking of Desperation

Filed under: Musings,Social Media — Tags: , , , , , , , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 12:15 am

An interesting question was raised by Julian Smith about how people spend their time acting desperate to get seen by the big names in Social Marketing.  I formatted the following response but then realized it was more the length of a blog then a comment so here it is.

9 months ago I started my blog MySpellingSucs.com – an unedited discussion of my dyslexia and ADD and my daughters Cerebral Palsy. I started it just to start writing something and do it consistently. I wanted to just say what I felt and do it the way I wanted to. I was tired of listening to fast easy money crowd who really didn’t know what they were talking about and I just wanted to do it my way. I write about how I have learned from my children and parenting, specific issues on CP, and I occasionally interview or write about inspirational folks with disabilities. I love writing there and it has brough me great pleasure as well as some recognition. I was awarded 2009 East Cobber Father of the year and this happened when my readership was only from my local network of friends.

Then about 6 months ago I started getting involved in community – twitter, expanding Facebook and LinkedIn, commenting on other blogs and that kind of thing. I found more readers coming to my site and then I really started getting interested in and attaching to people who were leading this revolution. Julien – Yourself included.

After a few months I found myself backing away from the “Guru’s” and focusing in the “Second Tier.” I do this because they have more time they are just as educated and have as many new and innovative ideas and they communicate more. I know the “Guru’s/First Tier” used to communicate with their audience as much as the “Second Tier” now does but the “Guru’s” don’t have the time to communicate with new folks as much as they would like and they need to keep their loyal audiences loyal so they communicate with as many as possible and are diligent about communicating with the folks that have helped them along the way.

It’s been in working with this “Second Tier” of bloggers that I have found I have the most pleasure and have begun to get the most recognition from the Guru’s. It makes sense.

In any community you want Gate Keepers. A Gate Keeper helps you know who the good and who the bad are when you don’t have the time to figure it out yourself. If the people I trust vet you and say your good than I’ll (as the guru) take a little additional time to find out more about who you are.

I guess what I’m saying is I like the idea of being yourself. That may have something to do with connecting with the crowd but do it your way and find the folks you enjoy communicating with.

This was originally going to be a comment in response to the blog post Reeking of Desperation but was too long. Julien thanks for the inspiration.

December 18, 2009

Web Marketing for small local businesses – CPC Advertising

Filed under: Musings — Tags: , , , , , , , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 7:39 am

I’ve owed this blog a CPC discussion for a while now. Here it is.

YouTube Preview Image

November 23, 2009

Web Marketing for small local businesses – Does Your advertising reach your audience

Filed under: Small Business — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 11:20 am

Billboard

http://www.flickr.com/photos/simonscott/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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.

November 10, 2009

The Neighborhood

Filed under: Small Business — Tags: , , , , , , , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 9:37 am

Main Street, Miles City

As I’ve been developing out my blog and my business service offering over the last few days I realized that there are two components to my strategy and I almost focused on the wrong one. All the other blogs I’ve written so far are correct and technically accurate. People of solid business minds who know this stuff will argue over different aspects or strategies for the best traffic placement how much value LongTail key words have, or how to use local Search. Used effectively any strategy will drive business. Here’s the thing, technical strategies are cold and have no feeling. The whole reason why it’s difficult to do business in a small community neighborhood now is because there is no neighborhood, at least not in Marietta ga. The square in Marietta is nice and does get some main street traffic but what if you own a business over where I live in East Cobb. Johnson’s ferry is basically a highway and main street doesn’t exist.

I remember as a kid my first job after caddying one round was helping at our neighborhood fish store. On Tuesday’s and Thursday’s  we would get a truck in from the Jersey Shore. I lived in Clarks Summit, Pa a small town suburb of Scranton PA. It was a beautiful area to grow up in. We were close to the Poconos and had an amazing fall leaf season. We also had a main street. The fish shore was on it. So I’d go in early meet the truck and start unloading. David the owner and I hustled all morning unloading the truck. Of course he decided he had to go in and start filleting the salmon as soon as the scallop bags were about to come of the truck. Anyway after I finished with the truck I had a few different jobs from helping out in the Kitchen to steaming crabs to cleaning the place up and occasionally, once I finished everything else they would let me work up at the counter.

Well every time a customer came in I knew who they were. I said hi and I always made recommendations about what we had gotten in that day. It was a small town, a neighborhood,  and I had grown up there,  everybody knew me and David loved having me there. He once told me that having me upfront was the best marketing he ever did. That was because we were a small neighborhood and everyone knew everyone.

Today there is no such thing as a small neighborhood. Or is there? Is there a neighborhood and main street? Social media is bringing back Main street believe it or not. The neat thing about this main street is doesn’t just have to be in your local postal code and a lot of businesses have taken advantage of the global reach but how can a small business who really does only need to reach the local community participate in this social net working field?

The key is finding and building that neighborhood. Most of the way’s to build the neighborhood are easy and free but they take effort and some time. Using Facebook, LinkedIn, twitter, and blogging you can develop community. If no other business owners in the same community then connect with them. On your blog write something of value about what they do and who they are. Help bring them business from your customer base in the Neighborhood and let them help bring you business from their customer base. Soon your neighbors in the community will be talking about both of you and how great you are to all of their neighbors.

If you own a small business in the East Cobb,  Marietta, or Roswell community I can help you find and participate on your main street via the internet and help you drive business while helping to build the Neighborhood online and off.

Offerings like the neighborhood co-op news letter will help you create the Main Street feel. Don’t forget to join twitter and subscribe to the @metzgerbusiness\mariettausers list. This list currently has 83 users that are located in Marietta inclusive of East Cobb. I promise the list will grow quickly. This list is set up and a free resource to anyone who follows it. This is an 83 person network dying to be tapped. I’ll be setting up a Roswell list and greater Atlanta area list as well.

If you don’t yet know how to make these social networks act as a neighborhood main street for your business, lets sit down and talk. I’ll help you develop you social media strategy so that your business has prime real estate on Main Street and you’ll feel good about helping your neighbors too.

September 15, 2009

Websites represent your business – What you need to know about building a web site

Filed under: Musings,Small Business — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 2:17 pm

I randomly dropped into a conversation the other day with someone who had just had a “beautiful” new website built for them. They were very excited about the site and awarded a free Adwords campaign. Being diligent about their business and loving their new “pretty” web site they were excited about taking advantage of the campaign and driving traffic to the site, they have picked excellent key words targeted the correct market and built a strong strategy for driving traffic from the campaign.

unfortunately there are a few, well maybe a bit more than a few details missing. I’m dividing the following information into basic and advanced. Lets start with the basics.
Basics:
1) Make sure that you own the URL.

2) Have the web site hosted on a server that will be accessable to you directly and any other professionals that you might decide to use to replace a previous vendor.

3) Make sure you have a unique user ID and password that you do not have to share with your vendors and if you do have to share the id and password change it after the work is complete.

4) When referring to a web site you’ll often here the term “look and feel.” This means that a web site has to look pretty but also “feel” pretty. You want your web site to be easy to use. The main menu should be accessable from every page on the site.

5) The background on a web site should be flat and bright. If you have white text on a patterned dark colored background you are going to turn people away.

Advanced:
6) There are too many free easy to use content management systems out there to pay someone to build you a static site that you have no control over and can not add content to easily. A content management systems allows you the business owner to easily add or change content on existing pages or even create new pages without much effort and with minimal knowledge.

7) Understand why you are building a web site. The web has changed in the past five years. You can no longer throw up a brochure and expect to get business from it. Actually this type of web site has never really worked period. At a minimum your web site should bring the customer one step closer to making a purchase. That means you need to get the customer to giver you their contact information in a form – Don’t expect the customers to call you just because they visited your web site. They aren’t even lead until they’ve given you some type of information. You can encourage customers to give you their contact information by asking them to fill out a form for a free consult or by offering a free newsletter of some sort. You can even just say if you’d like me to contact you please provide your information here.

8) measure the success of your site. How long are users staying on your site? What pages do they click on most? Which pages don’t they see? Which pages do they see? Where are your customers coming to your site from? Where do they go when they leave? All these questions can be easily answered by a free program from Google called Google Analytics. There are other web stat tracking programs available as well. The fact is that you need to know this information if you want your site to drive business.

9) Just putting a web site on line does nothing for you. You will not gain any traffic especially if you haven’t created a web site that meets feature 6 above because search engines won’t like your site. Here I’m going to offer a word of caution. You don’t need SEO. It helps buy you don’t need it. As a small business the cost of SEO can be too high. But you obviously still want to drive traffic to your site. This is where paid search, see my article on Adwords, and social media make the big payoff. You can also read my article on Tweet Strategy Conversion and measurement for more detail here.

10) Make sure that whomever creates your web site also goes to the effort of submitting the web site to the search engines. You probably want to be sure they have submitted you on the local search functions as well as the general search.

Never hire someone to build your web site that can’t articulate an understanding of the principles expressed in this blog.

September 18th – Seth Godin just wrote an excellent blog that is well worth reading about building web sites. The questions he posses are of primary importance. You can find his article here here.

September 6, 2009

Yearbooks? Facebook!

Filed under: Musings — Tags: , — MetzgerBusiness @ 9:58 am

I found an old acquaintance yesterday on Facebook. I went to high school with him in Pennsylvania and now he lives a few miles away from me here in Georgia. It was kind of odd and I had faint memories of him so I was talking with my wife and mentioned that I had to check my year book to bring up old memories. At which point my wife told my daughters you’ll always want to keep your year books!???

It struck me exactly how useless yearbooks will become with Facebook and other social networking applications. My kids will have contact with everybody they ever knew connected on Facebook and be able to recall all conversations, pictures, wall posts, and any other meaningless dribble that occurred during their high school years. What a change from the snapshot memories we are able to recall.

August 27, 2009

Social Media options what works

Filed under: Big Business,Intranet,Marketing,Musings,Small Business,Social Media — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 6:58 am

In this series of blogs I will be examining the various social media strategies and the social media tools that support them. I’ll be examining companies that are using the strategies, looking at why a particular strategy might have been chosen and discussing the success of the strategy. All of these companies and strategies are marketing/PR campaigns.

My goal is to write a case study for each of the social media tools and explain what strategies were applied to make the tool successful for the company applying the tool and strategy.

Here are the Social Media Tools we’ll examine.
Blogging
Bookmarking/tagging
Content Aggregation
Crowdsourcing
Microblogginng
Mashups
Online video
Photo Sharing
Podcasting
Social Networks ie. Facebook, Linkedin
VIrtual Worlds
Widgets
Wikis

I’m going to pick companies that have successfully applied these tools and attempt to define and explain the strategies they have applied. Since I want to be impartial I’ll pick the companies from a list that was compiled by Peter Kim in September 2008 of Social Media Examples. The list contains over 300 companies and the tools they are applying. You can find the article here A List of Social Media Marketing Examples.

Look for the first case study early next week.

August 19, 2009

Tweet Strategy, Conversion, and Measurement

Filed under: Small Business — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 6:30 pm

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.

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress